Natasha Lyonne had many hats to wear for season 2 of the Netflix series “Russian Doll.” In addition to starring as Nadia in every episode as well as co-writing several of the season’s episodes, she also directed episodes 1, 3, and 7 and took over as showrunner from season 1 boss Leslye Headland. That’s a lot to manage, but Lyonne, who is always up for a challenge, added one more to make season 2 of the time-traveling series come to life: she really picked up Hungarian for some of her pivotal sequences in Budapest, Hungary.
Lyonne put as much effort as she could into learning how to speak true Hungarian, whereas many films and television programmes would have simply let the viewer pretend they were speaking Hungarian and gone for accented English.
Hungarian! Micsoda koncepci !
According to Lyonne in an interview with IndieWire, she was eager to take on the challenge of learning Hungarian while both showrunning and acting in a series, but she wasn’t sure she could pull it off and didn’t want to make a joke out of it. She needed to be reassured that she could accomplish it by the other season 2 director, Alex Buono:
“I kept saying, ‘Alex, this isn’t some Bill and Fred s***. [Bill Hader and Lyonne’s ex Fred Armisen created spoof series ‘Documentary Now!’] It can’t be an impression of Hungarian. I’m going to have to be like Dustin Hoffman in Hungarian! And he was like, ‘That is the real s***! You can do this!'”
In order to perfect the pronunciation and rhythm, Lyonne studied anytime she had some free time, working with both acting instructor Terry Knickerbocker and Hungarian actress Anna Magyar (“Overlord”) She admitted to IndieWire that during other aspects of production, such as tech scouts, where the heads of production all walk over the set or location one last time to get the details in place, she trained with the first assistant director to ensure she did it correctly.
The connections between language and history
Given that both Lyonne and Nadia’s grandparents were Hungarian and had survived the Holocaust, the Hungarian language studies allowed Lyonne to learn more about both her character’s and her own past. She made light of the fact that “they always want to talk to you about this matrilineal nonsense” in therapy, saying it was one of the most frustrating aspects of therapy, but tracing her family history was crucial to understanding the themes of season 2. It changed the way she perceived trauma, particularly inherited trauma, and she was able to incorporate that into the show:
“You really have to use that specificity, especially now that everyone’s dead. But I heavily fictionalized around my family. I think that there’s questions around that time I’m very moved by more globally: What it is the tether from Hitler to all of us? Like, we throw around Hitler so loosely in modern times. Hitler’s almost a punchline. There was this whole generation of children of Holocaust survivors who really come by their case study very honestly.”
The main theme of “Russian Doll” season 2 is how the Holocaust affected Nadia’s family line permanently, beginning with her grandmother’s escape and passing trauma down to Nadia.
It’s important to note that many children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exhibit similar features, including a protectiveness over their forebears. Generational trauma is still being studied, and we’ve only just begun to grasp it. Reparative adaptational impacts are what Dr. Yael Danieli, PhD, refers to as the premise that survivors’ descendants attempt to improve the world for their parents, grandparents, and selves. Sounds rather similar to Nadia, huh?
