That said, you know, the character of Nadia– whose name is based on my love of Nadia Comăneci, the great gymnast from the ‘80s, so I always make her my kind of character name in anything I write. And I think I sort of thought of her as this genderless person, which is something we see with men often; like the character was based a lot on the famous detective character Philip Marlowe– who Elliott Gould plays beautifully in the movie The Long Goodbye– which is a lot of the reason Nadia mumbles to herself and stuff, and is always the detective on the case a little bit, trying to crack her own case. And you know, Jack Nicholson who played Philip Marlowe in Chinatown. I always sort of identified with those male characters or even the way Martin Sheen would stare up at the fan in Apocalypse Now and just be thinking to himself.

And I think that even like if I was sort of a millennial, I don’t know if I would even identify as female. I think that at this point I do and I love women so much that I’m definitely proud to be a woman and it feels true to who I am, but in some way when I look back at my life and certainly when I look forward at the kind of characters I wanna build and what I see a woman as meaning, it’s a much more genderless quality than I think historically the word woman has been imbued with. I don’t think I see my womanhood as this architected idea of like Doris Day or Marilyn Monroe or something. I see it as much closer to like a Harry Dean Stanton or a Dennis Hopper type-of-thing, you know?

-- Natasha Lyonne in Ladygunn

Natasha Lyonne for S Magazine 📸 Lea Winkler

Natasha Lyonne photographed by Ramona Rosales for BUST Magazine

Natasha Lyonne for Entertainment Weekly

Natasha Lyonne photo by Brayden Olson.