Leslye Headland writes women who would rather wreck the evening than be looked after, and gives them the sharpest lines. In Russian Doll the acid and the kindness sit in the same scene, and it is the best thing we have seen from her.
Fi1m perspective
Nadia Vulvokov dies under a taxi and comes back in a friend's bathroom, with the party still going outside the door. She smokes and goes back out. That is Leslye Headland's kind of heroine: a woman who treats her own catastrophe as an inconvenience and everyone who tries to help as a nuisance. Headland has said she usually writes "complicated female lead characters who do not follow the rules and have little to no redeeming qualities", and the first half of that is true. The second half is not, and Russian Doll (2019) is the proof.
She started in the theatre, with a cycle of plays on the seven deadly sins in the mid-2000s, and the stage shows in the work: people talk in rooms, and the talk is the action. Her first television credit was on Terriers (2010), Ted Griffin's one-season noir about two skint men in a pickup, where she worked alongside Shawn Ryan, Angela Kang and Phoef Sutton to keep a small weekly case and a larger slow rot in balance. Then came two features she wrote and directed, Bachelorette (2012), from her own play, and Sleeping with Other People (2015), a romantic comedy about a couple whose obstacle is their own behaviour. We have not reviewed either, but the pattern is already there: flawed women, sharp mouths, no lessons learned on schedule.
Russian Doll, created with Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler, is the pattern at full strength. Headland ran the first season and shares the direction with Lyonne, Jamie Babbit and Alexander Buono, and you cannot see the joins. The writing room, with Allison Silverman, Jocelyn Bioh and Alice Ju, gives Lyonne's mess something to push against in Charlie Barnett's Alan, a tidy, anxious man whose night is going as badly as hers. The two of them arguing about whose fault the universe is are the best scenes in the series. We came for the puzzle and by the end had stopped caring how it was solved, because we minded what happened to them, which Headland's reputation for acid had not led us to expect. The eighth episode explains more than it needs to, and a couple of strands are raised and not settled. The seven before it are sharp, short and none of them wasted.
Since then she has taken the voice somewhere larger, with The Acolyte (2024) for Star Wars, and back to where it began, with Cult of Love on Broadway the same year. We have not reviewed the first and cannot see the second from here. Headland is best close to a handful of people who cannot stop talking and cannot bear to be helped. Give her a room, a party and a woman who refuses to leave it gracefully, and she is one of the sharpest writers working. Give her a galaxy and we reserve judgement.
Biography
Leslye Headland is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. She received a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts in 2002 and began her career as an assistant at Miramax before becoming a staff writer on the FX series Terriers (2010).
Headland wrote and directed the feature films Bachelorette (2012) and Sleeping with Other People (2015), both adapted from her plays. She co-created the Netflix series Russian Doll (2019–2022), serving as writer, director and executive producer, and earned two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the first season. She later created and showran the Disney+ series The Acolyte (2024). As a playwright she has written a cycle of works based on the Seven Deadly Sins, including Assistance and Cult of Love, the latter of which premiered on Broadway in 2024.
