Natasha Lyonne

 

  1. Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, TV, 1997-2003.  SMG  auditioned for Cordelia and Charisma Carpenter for Buffy – and creator Joss Whedon (wisely) swopped ’em.  Before that decision he had chosen Natasha for the champion slayer of Sunnydale. But she was more into movies at the time. An uncredited exec producer of her series was Dolly Parton’s Sandollar combine.  Oh, and Buffy was the original  name of… Yoda! 

  2. Michelle Williams, Dawson’s Creek, TV,  1998-2003.  What the tabloids might call Battle of the Blonde Lookalikes…  except there was not battle at all.  Natasha still preferred films.   That’s where she’d started, at age six,  as Jack  Nicholson and Meryl Streep’s neice in Heartburn, 1985. She’d  made 50  more  before her TV smash, Orange is the New Black, 2013-2019. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter if she’d  turned down many roles, she replied: “Several pornos, yes!“

  3. Julia Stiles, O, 1999.    Lyonne  read for Desi, the updated Desdemona, in Tim Blake Nelson’s update of the Bard’s Othello… college basketball star Odinn believes everything Hugo tells him. Other potential Desis were Christina Ricci and Mena Suvari. Nelson edited his film by night while acting in the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou during the day.
 Explains much about both movies.
  4. Katharine Isabelle, Ginger Snaps, Canada, 2000.    Natasha snapped about the girl having her first period in a bizarre script actually equating werewolfism with puberty. Sarah Polley alsobacked away (with crucifix fingers?) from what Variety later called “a quietly subversive my-sister-is-turning-into-a-werewolf movie.” Isabelle and Emily Perkinsplayed the dysfunctional teens intwo sequels. Eight years later, they were sistsers again in Another Cinderella Story.
  5. EG Daily, The Devil’s Rejects, 2004.   There are films to make and those to avoid…  My (and Chicago’s) favourite critic, Roger Ebert, called this one “a gaudy vomitorium of a movie… it starts at icky and descends relentlessly through depraved and nauseating to the embrace of road kill.” EG is now billed as Elizabeth Daily. (She was Bulimia (!) in the 2016 series, Melania Trump’s Cousins: How to be a Model and Marry a Billionaire. And her  co-writer, Melinda Hall , was Melanoma).

  6. Tara Prince, Audie & The Wolf, 2007.  When the moon is full… Natsha avoided being Audie Bantam in a horror film with effects that were better than the acting.  Tara did not. Director Brian S. O’Malley now calls himself B Scott O’Malley.  He can run but… 

 Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls:  6