Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon: “Working together was exciting” | They star in “The Three Daughters” on Netflix

by times news cr

2024-10-13 04:12:55

What will it take for Natasha Lyonne to quit smoking? Like Marlene Dietrich and James Dean before her, Lyonne is an actress who, for as long as anyone can remember, has had a Marlboro Light permanently attached to her hand. Russian doll? A pack of cigarettes. Poker face? Cigar box. ¿Orange Is the New Black? Probably smuggling a pack of cigarettes into jail.

Getting Lyonne to kick the habit was no easy task. Unless you are Carrie Coon, of Lost, and the Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen, whose words of brotherly concern did overnight what dozens of medical professionals over the years had not achieved. “I left it for them,” says Lyonne in the large event room of a Soho hotel.

The three actresses had exchanged verbal blows, and Lyonne lost his voice the next day as a result of all the screaming. “Carrie and Lizzie were like, ‘God, that shouldn’t happen… maybe you should quit smoking,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah! Maybe I should,'” he recalls. “Doctors and strangers had been telling me that for decades, but that was the turning point, and since then I’ve been smoking 9,000 puffs a day, so it’s been incredible.” At that moment, he takes a drag on his big pink vape and smiles.

The tabloids will be desperate to learn that The trio’s shouting match wasn’t real, but part of The three daughters, a chamber drama that is now available on Netflix. Lyonne, 45, Coon, 43, and Olsen, 35, play half-estranged sisters who come together to care for their ailing father. As in many dramas between sisters, in this one there is guilt, misunderstandings, recriminations, resentment and love.

Filmed over 21 days in a modest Brooklyn apartment, It is an insular film with a contained melancholy. This is a characteristic feature of the director Azazel Jacobs, whose last film was a strange adaptation of French Exit, by Patrick deWitt, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Here he offers a lucid meditation on pain, if only to say that it is anything but.

As often happens when actors portray intimacy, the feelings on the screen have been transferred to real life, at least the positive ones. Coon and Olsen are ecstatic to see each other tonight, catching up like old classmates at a school reunion. I speak to Lyonne separately; arrives late from filming The Fantastic Four from Marvel. “You will not use anything we have said, because Natasha will be very interesting,” Coon jokes. “She’ll arrive looking amazing, probably in something black, leather and Chanel.”

None of the three actresses had worked with the other before. However, they are big fans of each other’s work, which might seem like lip service if there weren’t so much to admire in their careers. Coon, for example, is perhaps best known for HBO hits like The Leftovers y The Gilded Age; Olsen Por WandaVisionfrom Marvel, and wild wind, by Taylor Sheridan; and Lyonne for the seminal lesbian romantic comedy But I’m a Cheerleader.

“We’re all women—’women in film’ or whatever—and for me it was an exciting opportunity to work with these women that I felt I wanted to be intimate with,” Olsen says. It’s also weird sharing the screen with not one, but two women, Coon adds. “Normally movies say: we only need one, thank you. Or an old woman and a young woman.” Olsen rolls her eyes: “Or they want a female lead and a supporting female!” Coon nods; The thing is, “actresses never get to work together, so this was very satisfying.”

Ultimately, their bond was forged in the intellectual fire of Spelling Bee, a daily game of words in The New York Times. The three actresses played together between takes. “Now I’m that girl on set who’s obsessed with her pun,” Olsen says. “Really?” Coon replies, a little embarrassed. “I’ve never gone back to it. I’ve gone back to my hashtag #MomLife”.

When Lyonne arrives, dressed in black and Chanel as Coon predicted, she is just as effusive with her co-stars. “I’m in love with those two women,” says. “They have as much depth as they have people, and every day we went a little deeper. When we filmed the shouting match -the one that made Lyonne lose her voice and quit smoking for life- no one was afraid. “We were ready to make noise.”

It’s a rare moment of noise in a film that prefers to traffic in quieter sororo frictions. It has a tone that ranges between the elegiac and the mordant, and a rhythm of language reminiscent of theater. The opening scene is a close-up of Coon’s character performing a monologue against a white wall, uncut.

And The three daughters If it were a play, the character descriptions would be something like this:

Katie (Carrie Coon): controlling, bossy and abrasive older sister.

Rachel (Natasha Lyonne): laid-back middle sister, smokes pot and bets on sports.

Christina (Elizabeth Olsen): pacifist flees, does yoga.

Jacobs wrote the film with Coon, Lyonne and Olsen specifically in mind, so do what you want. But it’s funny to find out how someone sees you, everyone can agree. How we summarize ourselves – or how others do it for us – is the core of The three daughters, in which the sisters emerge from the boxes in which they have been placed, from their prescribed roles.

“We talk a lot about how your family perceives you and how you end up meeting their expectations,” says Olsen, who has two sisters, child stars turned fashion designers Mary-Kate and Ashley. In times of crisis, “we all start doing what our family has decided we should do. It’s like I’ve never acted like this in my life. Why am I doing this now? It’s so wild.” She was flattered and surprised to discover that Jacobs thought of her as a “tender caregiver” like Christina. “I liked that he saw that side of me,” Olsen says.

The script came to Lyonne (hand-delivered; nothing was sent digitally) at a strange time in her career. “I have found myself in a situation where I have created a avatar who isn’t exactly me, but who has big hair and a New York accent, dresses in black, and smokes a lot of cigarettes,” he says, pointing to his broad New York accent, his black outfit, and the vaporizer in his lap. “I guess I’m in for a moment. of my life in which “Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with me.”

On paper, Rachel felt too close to roles she had played before. “So I was flattered that Aza sent it to me, but also afraid that it seemed almost like a typecasting“says Lyonne, who was ultimately convinced by the “beautiful script.”

The role raised some questions for the actress about her own destructive habits. “You start to think, well, your dad is dying in the other room, you’re at home jogging; you’re not acting smoking for anyone. “What need do I have to self-harm and close myself off like this?” he wonders. “It opened up another layer of vulnerability and transparency for me. I freed myself from the obligation of trying to make anyone feel comfortable.”

Lyonne’s default mode is humor; He is the type of person who enjoys making a taxi driver laugh. “I am funny by nature”says. “But this laid it all bare. I was thinking, what is Aza’s version of what she thinks she’s seeing? Versus the version of myself that I sometimes throw out into the world as a defense mechanism to survive.”

In Rachel she found a side of herself that was “softer, sadder, but stronger.” “Interestingly, no matter how bad things have gone in my life, It has never occurred to me to join a cult, For example. I would be very bad at that,” Lyonne says. “I have a pretty strong sense of self; Although I may not like it as much, I definitely like it enough that there is no way I can convince myself to become a different person.”

As for Coon, Katie fits him like a glove. “I tend to play controlling and nervous women, I wonder why!”he jokes, causing a big laugh from Olsen, who is next to him. In person, Coon has a gift for comedy which contradicts his strong presence on the screen. She’s also candid about the reality of being a working mom. Coon shares a son and daughter with her actor-playwright husband Tracy Letts. Tasks as routine as learning the dialogues have become arduous. “You start to wonder what you did with all that time when you had it,” he laughs.

Coon just wrapped filming the third season of The White Lotus in Thailand, where he lived from February to July. “Whenever I had free time, I had to fly 22 hours back home to be with my family and make sure my marriage could survive to this time away,” he says. “It’s very hard for any family, especially in a country where there isn’t much support. I am a person with resources, so I can afford to hire several babysitters. “It kind of makes working meaningless, because all my money goes into childcare on any scale.”

He duel It is a very trite project in cinema, but in the case of women, it is usually a very specific type of grief. “I get a lot of scripts about dead children,” Coon says matter-of-factly. “When filmmakers want to put women under pressure, the worst thing they can imagine is them losing a child, which in some ways is reductionist. Do I have two children? Yes. Would that be the absolute worst thing I could imagine? Yes. But also there is a very broad way of suffering for women that goes far beyond motherhood. “There is a limit to our imagination of what women are capable of exploring in art.”

It’s familiar territory for both Coon and Olsen, who played grieving mothers in The Leftovers y WandaVision respectively. In Lyonne’s work, however, pain has occupied a less prominent place. Autodidact In all aspects, he admits that he gets more out of his personal life than he probably realizes. “I feel deeply identified with the idea that pain should be something isolated and appropriate,” she says.

Lyonne received “very complex relationship” with his mother and father, both deceased. Instead, she explains how she became “very close friends” with the famous filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron in the last five years of his life. “We played poker together; she was a real mentor who helped me get back on my feet,” Lyonne says. “AND Lou Reed: I had the opportunity to spend a wild day at their house listening to their albums and crying together,” he says. “When they died, I cried for them dramatically for weeks, participating in all the funerals and small gatherings. In a way, I was transposing that grief that I wasn’t really allowed to feel, but No one can tell you in this life what is going to tear you apart… and, of course, it is related to all the things you didn’t have and all the things you know you will never have. “Nothing in this life, least of all pain, moves in a straight line.”

Death is, everyone agrees, something that everyone would do well to spend more time reflecting on. “We are all going in one direction! “You could get out of here and get hit by something,” Olsen says. “Or in America, you worry about random acts of violence all the time.”

“That’s true. You’ll probably get shot,” Coon laughs. “There you have your headline!”

* Of The Independent of Great Britain. Special for Page/12.

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