If indie princess Natasha Lyonne can make it to 30 years old, maybe there’s hope for Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and all of those other 20-something hot messes after all. You may remember Natasha from roles in But I’m a Cheerleader, Slums of Beverly Hills and even her best known flick American Pie. During the height of her success, her career took a backseat to her messy drug habit–and she reportedly had the track marks to prove it. Curiously, actor Michael Rapaport was her landlord at the time of her troubles and evicted her for menacing neighbors and trashing his East Village apartment. In editorial published in Jane‘s May ’05 issue, he described her habits: “It looked like a grenade had gone off,” with smashed glasses in the kitchen and “standing water in the clogged tub with flies hovering over it.”

Years later, she cleaned up her act and Gothamist caught up with the 30-year-old actress who is currently starring in an off-Broadway play, and has a role in a upcoming Mickey Rourke flick. In the interview she shared how she’s surprised she made it to 30, and describes how her destructive behavior affected her career:

Here’s something—as you gained a bad reputation and people knew about your exploits from the press, did you see a change in the types of roles you get offered?

Am I being offered to play drug addicts regularly? The answer is no. What changed is that I didn’t wanna work. I didn’t care. Obviously behaving badly doesn’t do wonders for your career in any profession, more just on a responsibility level. But more importantly it doesn’t do wonders for your soul.

Have you been getting to work a lot lately?

Yeah, it’s been really nice. It feels like that stuff is behind me. Time is going by and it feels like I’m going to be all right. It’s kind of amazing, ya know? I could have been really screwed. It’s kind of amazing to be given the chance to make a living at it again and do good work again after the self-destructive mission I put myself through. And it’s kind of amazing that I wanted to do it all again. I went from being a person that didn’t wanna live to being a person who’s cleaning out my storage space and maybe even taking a macrobiotic cooking class.

Via Gothamist