Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein, better known as Natasha Lyonne, is an American actress and screenwriter, who is best known for her roles as Nicole "Nicky" Nichols in the Netflix comedy-drama series Orange is the New Black and Jessica in the American Pie film series. She also voiced Loretta Geargrinder in the 2005 Blue Sky Studios film Robots and Merton McSnurtle in the 2022 WAG animated film DC League of Super-Pets.
For Disney, she played Shelly Krippendorf in the 1998 Touchstone Pictures film Krippendorf's Tribe, Tanya Pincus in Ad Astra, and Darci in the 2001 Miramax film Kate & Leopold. She voices Pat in An Almost Christmas Story. She voiced Byrdie in the 2024 Disney+ series What If...?. She will portray a to-be-confirmed character in the 2025 Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Born in New York City, Lyonne is the daughter of Ivette Buchinger and Aaron Braunstein, a boxing promoter, race car driver, and radio host. Lyonne's parents were from Orthodox Jewish families, and she was raised Orthodox. Her mother was born in Paris, France, to Hungarian-Jewish parents who were Holocaust survivors. Lyonne has often joked that her family consists of "my father's side, Flatbush, and my mother's side, Auschwitz." Her grandmother, Ella, came from a large family, but only she and her two sisters and two brothers survived. Lyonne's grandfather, Morris Buchinger, operated a watch company in Los Angeles. During the war, he hid in Budapest as a non-Jew working in a leather factory.