I don't think that he was even exploring those options." He's open to everyone else's opinions, though. "Maybe because I am queer and I was a little more fluid in my own thoughts. "The queer side of it was not as difficult for me," he says. He was less frightened about the potential queer interpretations of Alan's journey this year where Alan, in the body of his grandma, has a flirtation with a fellow student named Lenny (Sandor Funtek), who wants her to help him escape into West Berlin to see his family. I mean, as much as I hate to admit it, I leaned in on it. "I just couldn't stop thinking about being in that woman's position and a man living in her body, taking over," he says. But he was and is still, however, nervous about how Alan's storyline would be perceived. He's talked to Lyonne about his experiences as an adoptee, and the piece of himself he feels he will never be able to know, despite his affection for his adoptive parents. "If we had two more episodes, we could've gone a little deeper into that history." Photo by Cole Saladino for Thrillistīarnett immediately understood the appeal of connecting with the past the way Alan does. Barnett, an admitted "planner," dove into research about the African students who came to East Germany during the Soviet Era, historical context that he wishes the show had time to include. While Lyonne's Nadia takes the 6 train back into the 1980s, where she inhabits the body of her mother, Barnett's Alan is transported to 1962 East Berlin where he lives as his grandmother Agnes (Carolyn Michell Smith), a student from Ghana studying in the Communist country.
"Our stories are invested into it as much as we are playing characters." This season, Lyonne has abandoned time loops for time travel, a concept she had in mind for the first season premiere, but refined the idea in the years it took for the series to go into production, delayed by the onset of COVID-19. " Russian is so interpersonal to our own actual individual lives," Barnett says. The series, which dropped its second season on Netflix last week, is the height of pop-culture existentialism, a wildly entertaining exploration of the cycles of trauma. It's really easy to get deep talking about Russian Doll, especially when you're as open as Barnett is. And I wasn't sure if it was like, am I being pulled to this or am I pushing myself? I'm now addicted to it because I love and hate people too. I think even as a kid, I recognized that. "But this duality of love and hate of this industry and this craft exists in me all the time. He was playing a suicidal alcoholic stuck in a time loop and it was difficult going back to the condo where he was staying on 14th Street away from the communities he knew when he lived in the city as a Juilliard student right out of high school.
He'd been drinking, and decided to stop right after production, inspired by the fact that series creator and star Natasha Lyonne and a number of other members of the crew had embraced sobriety.
Shooting the first batch of episodes in 2018 was "traumatic," he says. Fuck, it's so weird."Īfter the first season wrapped, he was definitely considering doing something else. "It was the most complicated and destructive thing I've ever gotten myself into and the best gift that I've ever given. We've just finished a photoshoot at Thrillist's offices, where he posed gamely and ate halal, the food he requested when I offered to bring him his favorite in the city. "I truly believed that I love and hate acting, all the same time at every moment of my life," Barnett tells me the morning before he'll be celebrated for his work as Alan Zaveri at the Season 2 premiere. Shortly before he started work on the second season of Russian Doll, Charlie Barnett was thinking about quitting acting.