Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon: ‘Our screaming match? We were ready to rumble’

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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

What does it take for Natasha Lyonne to quit smoking? Like Marlene Dietrich and James Dean before her, Lyonne is an actor who, for as long as anyone can remember, has had a Marlboro Light permanently affixed to her hand. Russian Doll? Pack of cigs. Poker Face? Pack of cigs. Orange Is the New Black? Probably smuggling a pack of cigs into jail.

Getting Lyonne to snuff out the habit, then, was no easy feat. That is, unless you’re Gone Girl’s Carrie Coon and Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen, whose words of sisterly concern did overnight what dozens of medical professionals over the years had failed to do. “They’re why I quit,” Lyonne tells me in the large event room of a Soho hotel.

The three actors had traded verbal blows, and Lyonne lost her voice the next day as a result of all the yelling. “Carrie and Lizzie were like, ‘Gosh, that shouldn’t happen... you know, maybe you should quit smoking?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah! Maybe I should!’” she recalls. “Now granted, doctors and strangers had been telling me this for decades, but that was the turning point – and I’ve been vaping 9,000 vapes a day ever since, so it’s been incredible.” On cue, she takes a puff of her big pink vape and smiles.

Tabloids will despair to learn that the trio’s screaming match wasn’t for real, but part of His Three Daughters, a bruising chamber drama that is now on Netflix. Lyonne, 45, Coon, 43, and Olsen, 35, play semi-estranged sisters who convene to care for their sick father. Like many sibling dramas, this one involves guilt, misunderstanding, recrimination, resentment, and love.

Shot over 21 days in a modest Brooklyn apartment, it’s an insular watch with a tamped-down melancholia. That’s something of a trademark for director Azazel Jacobs, whose last film was an off-kilter adaptation of Patrick deWitt’s French Exit that starred Michelle Pfeiffer. Here, he offers a clear-eyed meditation on grief – if only to say it is anything but.

As often happens when actors portray intimacy, the feelings on screen have bled into real life – the positive ones, at least. Coon and Olsen are ecstatic to see one another tonight, catching up like old classmates at a school reunion. Lyonne, I speak with separately; she’s running late from the set of Marvel’s The Fantastic Four. “You won’t use anything we’ve said, because Natasha will be so interesting,” jokes Coon. “She’ll arrive looking amazing, probably in something black, leather and Chanel.”

None of the three actors had worked with each other before. They are, though, big fans of one another’s work, which might sound like lip service if there wasn’t so much to admire in each of their careers. Coon, for one, is perhaps best known for HBO heavy hitters like The Leftovers and The Gilded Age; Olsen for Marvel’s WandaVision and Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River; and Lyonne for the seminal lesbian romcom But I’m a Cheerleader.

“We’re all women – ‘women in film’ or whatever – and it was an exciting opportunity for me to work with these women who I felt I wanted to become closer with,” Olsen says. It’s rare, too, that you get to share the screen with not one but two women, adds Coon. “Usually films will say, we just need one, thanks. Or one old and one young.” Olsen rolls her eyes in agreement: “Or they want one lead and one supporting!” Coon nods; the point is that “actresses never get to work together, so this was very satisfying”.

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

When Lyonne does arrive – indeed wearing something black and Chanel as per Coon’s prediction – she is similarly effusive about her co-stars. “I am so in love with those two women,” she says. “They have such a depth of personhood, and we just kept getting a bit deeper each day. By the time we shot the screaming match” – the one that caused Lyonne to lose her voice and quit a lifetime of cigarettes – “nobody was afraid. We were ready to rumble.”

It’s a rare moment of noise in a film that prefers to traffic in quieter sororal friction. It has a tone that dips between elegiac and mordant, and a rhythm of language that recalls theatre. The opening scene is a close shot of Coon’s character performing a monologue against a white wall, no cutaways.

If His Three Daughters were a play, the character descriptions would read something like this:

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

Rachel (Natasha Lyonne): laidback middle sister, smokes weed and gambles on sports

Christina (Elizabeth Olsen): flighty pacifist, does yoga

Jacobs wrote the film with Coon, Lyonne, and Olsen specifically in mind, so read into that what you will. But it’s a funny thing to discover how someone sees you, they can all agree. How we sum ourselves up – or how others do it for us – is at the heart of His Three Daughters, throughout which the siblings step out from the boxes they’ve been placed in, out from their prescribed roles.

“We talk a lot about how family perceives you and how you end up performing their expectations,” says Olsen, who has two sisters of her own, the child stars turned fashion designers Mary-Kate and Ashley. In times of crisis, “we all start performing the thing that’s been decided for us in our family. It’s like, this isn’t how I act in my life! Why am I doing this right now? It’s so wild.” She was flattered and surprised to find that Jacobs thought of her as a “tender caretaker” like Christina. “I liked that he saw that side of me,” says Olsen.

The script got to Lyonne (hand-delivered; nothing was sent digitally) at an odd time in her career. “I’ve found myself in a situation where I’ve created an avatar that’s not quite me but does have this big hair and this New York accent, and wears black clothes and smokes a lot of cigarettes,” she says, gesturing to her broad New York accent, her all-black outfit, and the vape in her lap. “I guess I’m at a certain point in my life where Hollywood doesn’t quite know what to do with you.”

On paper, Rachel felt too close to roles she’d played before. “So, I was flattered that Aza sent me this, but also afraid that it would seem almost like typecasting,” says Lyonne, who was won over in the end by the “beautiful script”.

The role posited some questions for the actor about her own destructive ways. “You start to think, well, your dad is dying in the other room, you’re at home, you’re in your sweatpants; you’re not performing smoking for anyone. What is my need to sort of self-harm and shut down this way?” she asks. “It opened up this whole other layer of vulnerability and transparency. I let myself off the hook of trying to make anyone comfortable.”

Lyonne’s default mode is humour; she’s the type of person who enjoys making a taxicab driver laugh. “I’m naturally funny,” she says. “But this stripped everything away. I was thinking: what is Aza’s version of what he thinks he is seeing? As opposed to the version of myself that I’ll sometimes throw out into the world as a defence mechanism to survive.”

In Rachel, she found a “softer, sadder, but stronger” side to herself. “Weirdly, as bad as things have ever been in my life, it’s never occurred to me to join a cult, for example. I’d be really bad at that,” Lyonne says. “I have a pretty strong sense of self; even though maybe I don’t like myself that much, I definitely like myself enough that there’s no way I’d be convinced to become a different person.”

As for Coon, Katie is well within her wheelhouse. “I tend to play controlling, high-strung women – I wonder why!” she jokes, producing a big-hearted laugh from Olsen next to her. In person, Coon has a goofiness to her and a knack for comedic timing that belies her steely onscreen presence. She is candid, too, about the realities of being a working parent. Coon shares a son and a daughter with her husband, the actor and playwright Tracy Letts. Tasks as routine as learning lines have become arduous. “You start to question what you were doing with all that time when you had it,” she laughs.

Coon has just finished filming the third season of The White Lotus in Thailand, where she lived from February till 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 this time being away,” she says. “It’s very hard for any family, especially in a country where there’s not a lot of support. I’m a person of means, so I can afford to hire several nannies. It kind of makes working pointless, because all my money is going to childcare on any scale.”

Grief is a well-trodden project in film, but in the case of women, it’s more often than not a very specific type of grief. “I get a lot of scripts about dead kids,” Coon says matter-of-factly. “When filmmakers want to put women under duress, the worst thing they can imagine is for them to lose a child, which in some ways is reductive. Do I have two children? Yes. Would that absolutely be the worst thing I could imagine? Yes. But there’s also a very broad way for women to suffer that goes well beyond motherhood. There’s a limit in 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 and WandaVision respectively. In Lyonne’s work, though, grief has featured less prominently. Self-taught across the board, she admits to mining her personal life probably more than she realises. “I deeply resonate with [defying] this idea that grief is supposed to be siloed and appropriate,” she says.

Lyonne recalls her “very complex relationship” with her mother and father, both of whom are dead. By contrast, she goes on to explain how she became “very tight” with the celebrated filmmaker and author Nora Ephron in the last five or so years of her life. “We’d play poker games together; she was a real mentor who got me back on my feet,” says Lyonne. “And Lou Reed – I had the opportunity to spend this wild day at his house listening to his albums and crying together.

“When they died, I wept for them so dramatically for weeks on end, participating in every memorial and small gathering. In a way I was transposing this grief that I wasn’t really allowed to feel, but no one can tell you in this life what’s going to crack you open – and of course, it’s connected to all the things you didn’t have, and all the things you know you never will. Nothing in this life, and certainly not grief, moves in a straight line.”

Death is something, they all agree, that everyone would do well to spend more time dwelling on. “We’re all going one way! You could walk out of here and be hit by something,” says Olsen. “Or in the States, you just worry about random acts of violence all the time.”

“That’s true. Getting shot is probably going to happen to you,” Coon laughs. “There’s your headline!”

‘His Three Daughters’ is streaming on Netflix