Recently I rewatched Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby. (i may review it in a later blog) I don't know if it was a straight to video release but Natasha Lyonne had the lead role in it, playing a similarly repressed teenage girl who had been abused and molested by her family and developed a severe eating disorder. She is arrested and sent to juvenile lockup in preparation of being sent to prison and while she is there she becomes the cellmates of another teenager whose schizophrenic and who happens to be a serial killer. Later in the film they escape.

I mention all of this because, like I'm A cheerleader, this is a brilliant dark comedy and you can't imagine anyone but Lyonne in the lead role. The film, I should mention is also a dead on satire of Hansel and Gretel go on a killing spree and the film actually name checks it at one point.

Lots of child actors have the ability to sound older than years: Natasha Lyonne is the only child actress who SOUNDS like she was born forty years old at sixteeen.For the record, she's just as brilliant an actress today in Russian Doll and Poker Face as she was in Cheerleader and Slums of Beverly Hills - and what I find the most astonishing is SHE HASN'T CHANGED ONE ASPECT OF HER PERSONALITY. I've grown up watching Lyonne perform and what's astonishing is that while I've aged, she seems exactly the same as she was personality wise. I swear to god she came out of the womb with a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. Maybe she's spent her entire career playing herself but that's fine with me because Lyonne could really make reading the phone book sound like fun.