Let the rain fall down, Natasha Lyonne is coming clean.
The Russian Doll and But I’m a Cheerleader actress recently shared a hilarious anecdote when asked which celebrity she was last mistaken for. After joking she was “offered the Pacino part in Glengarry Glen Ross,” she told Happy Sad Confused podcast host Josh Horowitz, “Oh yeah, I remember once I dropped out for a while… and Jennifer Coolidge saw me at the Chateau Marmont. I had straight hair, and she thought I was Hilary Duff, and I was so confused.”
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Lyonne mused, “Maybe I’ve become too well, you know what I mean. Because whatever I’m projecting, is something I’d rather scratch real quick. I have lost my edge. Hilary seems like a lovely person, and sometimes I’ll look at pictures of her and I think, ‘Maybe this is a good thing! I think they mean this kindly.”
Lyonne, with her fiery red curls and thick New York accent, and Duff, with her honey blonde waves, don’t look much alike now. It would also be hard to find two actresses of their generation with more starkly divergent careers — with Duff cutting her teeth on the Disney channel and graduating to pop music and premium cable, while Lyonne debuted as an indie darling and has now carved out a venerable position in the streaming landscape as a writer-actress.
But flash back to the 2000s, and Duff and Lyonne could have been as easily mistaken as Duff recently was for Lindsay Lohan, another millennial icon. Plus, Coolidge starred in American Pie alongside Lyonne in 1999, going on to appear opposite Duff in A Cinderella Story just five years later.
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Duff said Coolidge didn’t get “very far” with her mistake, saying “‘Oh! I thought you were Hilary Duff,’ and I was like, ‘I’m not,’ and it was over.”
“I would rather be mistaken for Keith Richards or something,” Lyonne joked. “But I guess I’m a Hilary Duff sort, you guys can see that.”
Jennifer Coolidge and Hilary Duff in ‘A Cinderella Story’. warner bros./everett
Coolidge recently experienced a jarring case of mistaken identity, one that went viral, although it was scripted. In season 2 of The White Lotus, Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid-Hunt does her best Monica Vitti impression after arriving at the Sicily resort, and she asks Sabrina Impacciatore’s Valentina who she looks like. “Peppa Pig?” she responds to Tanya’s dismay.
Lyonne, meanwhile, is gearing up for the return of her most recent TV project, Poker Face. Season 2 does not yet have a release date, but season 1 showrunners Nora and Lilla Zuckerman confirmed a second season is coming to Entertainment Weekly in 2023, and in July, season 2 showrunner Tony Tost announced on Instagram that Lyonne will serve as the first episode’s director.
Cre: Entertainment
