Natasha Lyonne's Sweet Comeback

I almost don’t recognize Natasha Lyonne when she walks into SoHo’s Circa Tabac. Fifteen minutes later, she zooms right past me and I have to guess, “Natasha?” before she turns. “Shira!” she replies, like we’re old friends, or maybe new ones. It’s the blown-out hair that threw me. “There’s still a little curl to it. It’s not straight. It’s just not natural. Look, this is what happens to you when you get involved with drugs,” she jokes. “Chloë [Sevigny] hates it when I wear it straight. She’s always like, ‘Where’s those big beautiful curls?’” Sporting dark-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses, bundled in a gray pea coat, Lyonne looks like any pretty, thin New Yorker rushing to be somewhere.

But who is Natasha Lyonne? In 1999, she was Teen Angst. The voice of the awkward and intellectually sarcastic Jewish kid. Beetlejuice/Heathers era Winona Ryder with an extra dose of self-deprecation. Everyone knew her as Jessica in American Pie, the girl who advised “virginal” Tara Reid to just get laid already (“It’s not a space shuttle launch; it’s sex.”). But it was Vivian in the Slums of Beverly Hills and poor, repressed Megan in But I’m a Cheerleader that made the cool kids love her. She was smarts, insecurity, alienation and sometimes tits, all wrapped in a 5 foot 3 inch package. And then came drugs, arrests, hospitals and that infamous mug shot. Now cleaned up, years later, is she still the same Natasha?

We’re at one of the city’s last remaining smoking bars because cigarettes are her last remaining vice (she brought two packs and shared), and this is pretty much her first interview since her publicly chronicled downward spiral. The New York Times ran an interview that touched on her recovery, but now sober for almost three years, she’s in an even better place. Unfortunately, Circa Tabac doesn’t serve coffee, so it’s bottled water and edamame for us. “Maybe we’ll go on a bender together, Shira. Maybe it’s time to have a few drinks again,” she teases in her naturally husky voice, tempered by almost two decades of Marlboros. She has a tough girl Brooklyn accent. When she goes off on a comic riff, it’s like she’s channeling Joe Pesci mixed with Woody Allen, who incidentally directed her first “grownup” role: the narrator part in Everyone Says I Love You.

“I was 16 years old. It was my rite of passage,” she says, and I ask her if she’d work for the legend again. “I don’t know, if he calls maybe.”

The "Wasted Issue" is sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll... but mostly drugs. Highlight include an incredible interview with Natasha Lyonne and a photo shoot styled by Jessie Cohan.