“Orange Is the New Black” and “Poker Face” star Natasha Lyonne has revealed she suffered a relapse after what’s believed to be nearly 20 years of sobriety.
The 46-year-old Emmy nominee tweeted late Friday that she was taking her relapse “public,” and seemingly promised to share more details soon.
Took my relapse public more to come
— natasha lyonne (@nlyonne) January 24, 2026
She reflected further in a follow-up post early Saturday morning, writing, “Recovery is a lifelong process. Anyone out there struggling, remember you’re not alone.”
Lyonne asked that anyone facing similar setbacks “stay honest,” because we’re only as “sick as our secrets” and we never know how our experiences may help others.
“Keep going, kiddos. Don’t quit before the miracle,” she wrote. “Wallpaper your mind with love. Rest is all noise and baloney.”
While Lyonne didn’t say when she relapsed or with what, she did respond to multiple fans sharing their messages of support.
“There but for the grace,” she replied to one user who reassured her that she’d make it back again.
“May become a pothead or a nun. TBD,” she added in her signature deadpan tone.
Lyonne’s battle with substance abuse received widespread media attention in early 2000s after multiple run-ins with the law. In 2005, her heroin addiction landed her in the ICU with hepatitis C, a heart infection and a collapsed lung. She eventually got sober with the help of court-appointed rehab she completed in 2006.
“Spiraling into addiction is really, really scary,” she told Entertainment Weekly six years later. “I was definitely as good as dead, you know?”
Lyonne was “doing OK” when she spoke to the Daily News in 2017 about the “life-affirming” nature of playing addict Nicky Nichols on “OITNB,” for which she earned her first Emmy nomination.
“Having some usefulness in your day job makes you better, so much more capable to transmit or articulate something,” she said, adding that filming some scenes for the series proved “problematic … because I do know them so intimately, and yet I find myself a decade away from them.”
In 2023, while attempting to give up smoking, Lyonne told Variety she’s “naturally wired for self-destructive crutches. I f–king love a vice.”
Around that same time, comedian John Mulaney confirmed in his Netflix special, “Baby J,” that Lyonne was one of the attendees at his “star-studded intervention” to address his relapse, which resulted in him going to rehab in late 2020. Also at the intervention were Seth Meyers, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll and Lyonne’s ex Fred Armisen, among others.
