Hot Ticket Interview
American Pie's Natasha Lyonne is funky, funny and fired up for stardom.
Natasha Lyonne’s journey to the silver screen began on the New York City subway. Lyonne, then a pint-size child, started animatedly reading aloud from The Wall Street Journal, to the confused delight of her fellow passengers. “They started laughing, and then I stood up on my seat and kept reading,” says Lyonne, now 19. Lyonne’s gift for converting a ho-hum situation into entertainment was not lost on her parents: They quickly got their spirited daughter a manager. The next thing Lyonne knew, she says, “I was on Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” From there, she landed small roles in movies such as Heartburn and Dennis the Menace. Last summer she made a splash as Vivian, a girl dealing with puberty and poverty, in Slums of Beverly Hills. The main difference between Vivian and Lyonne—bra size. “Vivian was a perfect C, and I’m a 32A,” she gripes. “I look in the mirror, see my stomach grow out and wonder why my breasts don’t follow!” Wishing for bigger boobs isn’t the only thing Lyonne does in her spare time. Currently single, the actress is on the lookout for an intelligent 19-year-old guy to date: “someone who’s on the same page as me,” she says. In fact, reading is another favorite pastime. Lyonne also writes in her dream journal (she’s kept diaries since she was 14). In one dream, she gets asphyxiated by a shirt: “I was shopping and I was trying on some bizarre shirt that had a bow tie in the back and I was like, Why is this shirt trying to kill me? I got a little nervous,” she says, laughing. Perhaps Lyonne will dream about walking down a red carpet to a film premiere. She has six movies coming out in 1999, including American Pie, in which she plays Jessica, the virgin sex sage at a high school full of randy guys. As an actress on the rise, you’d think that Lyonne gets mobbed on the street by starstruck fans. When she is recognized, it’s usually by “tourists who think I was one of the guests on The Ricki Lake Show,” she says. But her friends have a hard time distinguishing Lyonne from the characters she plays. With her typical dry wit, she remarks, “Oh, man, that’s why it’s called acting.” |
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