Natasha Lyonne

Natasha Lyonne (born 1979) has been acting since childhood, surviving both Hollywood and her own well-documented wilderness years to become one of television’s most distinctive auteurs: Nicky Nichols in Orange Is the New Black, then co-creator and star of Russian Doll (2019) and star of Poker Face. She is, by her own description, a cinephile of the old school — which made her next move a shock.

An ethical-AI studio, from inside Hollywood

With partner Bryn Mooser, Lyonne co-founded Asteria, an artist-led generative AI film and animation studio whose defining constraint is that its underlying model, Marey — built with research startup Moonvalley — is trained exclusively on licensed material. She has contrasted that approach with rival models trained on scraped, unlicensed data, memorably dismissing them to Deadline as a “human centipede” of other people’s work.

In April 2025, Asteria announced Uncanny Valley, Lyonne’s feature directorial debut, co-written with Brit Marling — a story about a teenage girl whose augmented-reality game bleeds dangerously into the real world, made by combining traditional filmmaking with AI tools. The project made her one of the most prominent entertainers to embrace the technology, and landed her on the TIME100 AI list in 2025.

The backlash was immediate — some cinephiles and artists accused her of legitimizing the thing threatening their livelihoods, a criticism she engages rather than dodges. Her bet is that artists who refuse the technology will simply cede it to studios and tech companies, while artists who claim it can set its ethical terms: licensed data, human authorship, and, as she puts it, independent film “at true visionary scale.”