Natasha Lyonne is defying time. Again.

The RUSSIAN DOLL star and co-creator confronts the past in the second season

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you stop a time loop of continuous death and decide to start living? That’s where you’ll find Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia Vulvokov in the second season of Netflix show Russian Doll, after breaking free of a cycle that forced her to relive her 36th birthday party.

If Season 1 of the darkly comic, highly conceptual show was about self-destruction in your mid-thirties, Season 2 is about intergenerational trauma and, as Lyonne, who is also the show’s co-creator, says, a chance to “illuminate a deeper spectrum of humanity”.

Set almost four years after Season 1’s finale, Nadia is in the final weeks before her 40th birthday. But this is Russian Doll, and soon Nadia and her fellow time-loop traveller Alan (Charlie Barnett) are confronted by a portal in Manhattan that takes them into their pasts.

“It’s an escape hatch away from the responsibility of being a participating member of society,” Lyonne tells Empire. “There’s this middle-aged expectation on us to show up, which means that we’re now the adults.”

Season 1, in which Nadia wrestles with her relationships and responsibilities, was a semi-autobiographical story, says Lyonne. The new episodes, however, gave her the chance to move away from past grievances. “We’re only as sick as our secrets, so there is healing and relief in leading a life of transparency,” she muses. The concept of the portal that confronts Nadia with her past was a way for her to “be grateful for an intense access to extreme human condition.”

Lyonne cast close friends in Season 1, including Chloë Sevigny, who she describes as her “sister”, and she encouraged her cast mates to recommend their platonic family for Season 2. “Working with friends makes the history between people even in small scenes feel palpable,” she explains.

As for fears that after a three-year break the audience may have forgotten about Nadia, Lyonne says she felt so much “goodwill in my soul” after the first season. The show’s return still feels “scary” to Lyonne, but the good kind of scary. “Russian Doll is a philosophical and existential psychedelic adventure,” she says. “It’s asking more questions than it answers.” Be prepared to be even more confused and yet understood than before.