Natasha Lyonne has been "trying to get a life" since her parents died.

The 45-year-old actress has been in show business since she was a child and came to prominence as a teenager in the late 1990s with her role in 'Everyone Says I Love You’ but has turned to directing in recent years and admitted that since losing her mother and father, she’s been adjusting to life without them.

She told Vanity Fair: "I’m trying to get a life. I discovered that recently. I was like, 'Oh, s***'. I think, probably, because my parents died, and well, my brother’s been out on the lamb for a couple decades. But anyway: I’ve been out here on my own for a solid, I don’t know, 25 years or something. Weird because I just turned 30."

The former 'Orange is the New Black' star - who lived independently from her family since she was 16 and split up with Fred Armisen in 2022 after almost a decade together – insists she has always “aspired” to be a “brain” who could “use storytelling to shift perspective”.

She said: “Yeah, I was put in this business at four years old or something. Pee-wee’s Playhouse by six, then Woody Allen’s kid at 15, and Alan Arkin’s kid at 17. When I went to Tisch around then—I think I was 16, they had skipped my senior year, it’s the only school I applied to—it was to be a film and philosophy double major. I could put some Bergman into these Fellini-esque things, where maybe I would play-act as a Charlie Chaplin type doing all the jobs. I wanted to be a filmmaker and a thinker. I always had this desire, more than anything, to be a mind, a brain in a jar who could actually use storytelling to shift a perspective. That’s always what I’m aspiring to.”

Natasha admits it’s hard to be perceived differently once you’ve been earmarked as one thing in the public eye.

She added: "I don’t want to undermine the beauty of comedy within all that. George Carlin [comedian] has really pulled off some tricks. It isn’t really a desire to shake a self or feeling hampered by it. It’s just this idea of being able to understand the gift. You stick around long enough, and you may get a few opportunities for people, or even commerce, or whatever to allow you to just show more sides of a 360 human being. We are all different people in private and in different relationships with different people and in different scenarios."