the cut on tuesdays

The Secret to Natasha Lyonne’s Success: Resisting the Urge to Stay in Bed

Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg; Photographs by Heather Sten

The Cut on Tuesdays

A weekly podcast from the Cut and Gimlet Media, with host Molly Fischer.

On this week’s show, we’re bringing you some of our favorite conversations from the How I Get It Done live event that happened earlier this month. Like Natasha Lyonne, explaining the No. 1 fundamental secret to success.

Natasha: You gotta leave the house in this life, right? I always find that I’m dreading, dreading, dreading leaving the house. I’m like, “Please don’t ask me to do anything ever. I’m begging you.” Leaving the house is a crucial element of participation in life that is very instinctual to want to resist. If you give me a day off, my dream is to stay in bed all fucking day with nobody around.

So, if you’ve successfully left the house: well done. The next step is getting used to rejection. Natasha and her Russian Doll co-star Greta Lee had this to say about the rejection that actually made their new show possible.

Natasha: Listen, Russian Doll was the big achievement, but prior to that, Greta and I had also done together a different show that I created with Amy Poehler at NBC that actually got rejected severely.


Greta: Yeah, actually denied. Dead in the water.


Natasha: And that show was called Old Soul … After that show didn’t happen, Poehler turned to me and she said, “Hey, what’s the show we would really want to make if there were no rules, if there was no network, if it was just anything, what do we really, really want to say?” And that became the early ideas of the formation of what would become the show we created a together called Russian Doll.

Natasha said that, at this point, she’s glad that first show was rejected. It was liberating.

Natasha: Rejection is God’s protection. Like in the truth of the matter was, we had no way of knowing at the time of that in fact we were going to end up making something that was far, far greater just in terms of, on an integrity level of the things I really want to say in this life, being an opportunity and a forum to be able to sort of speak whatever our own version of the truth is without sounding too grandiose.


Greta: Thank God Old Soul didn’t get picked up.


Natasha: It’s almost like a relationship where it’s like, it’s not that this guy wasn’t great; it’s just, thank goodness I didn’t have a baby with him.

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Why Natasha Lyonne Resists the Urge to Stay in Bed