Russian Doll
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50 free Russian Doll trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Russian Doll starts with a simple, nasty joke: Nadia leaves her own birthday party, dies, and wakes up back at the party. Then it happens again. Across two short seasons the series turns that loop into a mystery, a comedy about New York and a story about family and what people owe each other. This quiz covers the plot of both seasons, the characters around Nadia and Alan, the actors who play them, the songs on the soundtrack and the people who wrote, directed and produced the series. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss. Most questions suit anyone who has watched the series once, with a few harder ones for viewers who have gone round the loop more than that. It works for a watch-party quiz or a quick test before a rewatch.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Harry Nilsson song plays every time Nadia comes back to life at her birthday party in Russian Doll?
Gotta Get Up
Gotta Get Up opens Nilsson's 1971 album Nilsson Schmilsson, and his estate capped how many times the series could replay it.
Q 02What hits and kills Nadia the first time, as she runs across the street after her missing cat in Russian Doll?
A taxi
A taxi strikes her outside the deli on the first night, and in the finale it is Alan who trails her to steer her clear of it.
Q 03Which Parks and Recreation star co-created Russian Doll and shares a writing credit on its first two episodes?
Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler stayed behind the camera as an executive producer, and her company Paper Kite Productions made the series as it had made Broad City.
Q 04Russian Doll's second-season finale takes its title from which Russian word for a set of wooden nesting dolls?
Matryoshka
Matryoshka dolls date from the 1890s, and although many people call them babushka dolls, that word simply means grandmother or old woman in Russian.
Q 05Which Schitt's Creek star joined Russian Doll's second season to play Ruth as a younger woman in 1982?
Annie Murphy
Annie Murphy, an Emmy winner as Alexis Rose, plays the therapist Ruth Brenner in the past while a stage veteran keeps the role in the present day.
Q 06Devin Ratray, the deli customer Nadia interrupts in Russian Doll, played big brother Buzz in which Christmas film?
Home Alone
Home Alone made Ratray famous in 1990, and in the series he is trying to buy a lottery ticket when Nadia cuts in.
Q 07Russian Doll's first season premiered on the day before which annual observance?
Groundhog Day
Groundhog Day falls on February 2, and the 1993 Bill Murray film of that name traps a weatherman in a loop of that single date.
Q 08Which New York subway line carries Nadia back to 1982 in the second season of Russian Doll?
The 6 train
The 6 train, the Lexington Avenue local, picks her up ten days before her 40th birthday and later sends Alan into his own family's past.
Q 09What is the name of Nadia's wandering cat, which she keeps searching the East Village for in Russian Doll?
Oatmeal
Oatmeal is played by a cat called Louie, and the search for him leads Nadia to several of her deaths and to her friendship with a homeless neighbor.
Q 10Which platform released all eight episodes of Russian Doll's first season on a single day in February 2019?
Netflix
Netflix ordered the comedy in 2017 and brought it back three years after the first run for a second season of seven episodes.
Q 11Natasha Lyonne says Russian Doll's tightly wound Alan was loosely based on which Saturday Night Live alumnus, her ex?
Fred Armisen
Fred Armisen, the Portlandia star she dated for years, is in her telling the neat, sealed-up opposite of the chain-smoking Nadia.
Q 12Which Oscar-nominated star of Boys Don't Cry plays Nora, Nadia's troubled mother, in Russian Doll?
Chloë Sevigny
Chloë Sevigny, who had starred beside Natasha Lyonne in the 2016 horror film Antibirth, was a guest in season 1 and a regular in season 2.
Q 13Which actor, later the lead of the film Past Lives, plays birthday-party host Maxine in Russian Doll?
Greta Lee
Q 21Which Russian Doll co-creator ran its first season and later created the Star Wars series The Acolyte?
Leslye Headland
Leslye Headland directed four episodes, including the first, and is married to Rebecca Henderson, who plays Nadia's artist friend Lizzy.
Q 22Which District 9 lead plays Chez, the charming con man of 1982, in Russian Doll's second season?
Sharlto Copley
Sharlto Copley plays Nora's boyfriend, who makes off with the family fortune while Nadia is stuck inside her mother's body.
Q 23In Russian Doll's second season, where does the subway deliver Alan in 1962, inside his grandmother's body?
East Berlin
Greta Lee plays Maxine in both seasons and went on to The Morning Show, a role that brought her an Emmy nomination.
Q 14Which gold coin does Nadia wear on a necklace in Russian Doll, a relic of her grandmother's lost fortune?
Krugerrand
Krugerrand coins, South African gold, were how her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, chose to hold the family's wealth, and season 2 follows Nadia's hunt for the rest of it.
Q 15What does Alan plan to give his girlfriend Beatrice on the night that keeps repeating for him in Russian Doll?
An engagement ring
An engagement ring sits in the box he fidgets with, and the jeweler's name on that box is how Nadia tracks him down.
Q 16Where are Nadia and Alan when they first speak in Russian Doll, moments before both are killed together?
In a falling elevator
In a falling elevator, Alan stays eerily calm, which is how Nadia learns she is not the only person who keeps dying.
Q 17In which East Village park does Nadia fall asleep beside a homeless friend and freeze to death in Russian Doll?
Tompkins Square
Tompkins Square Park covers about ten acres of Alphabet City, and Nadia first wanders in while looking for her cat.
Q 18What pushed the start of filming on Russian Doll's second season back by a full year?
The COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic halted the production in March 2020, so the second season reached viewers three years after the first.
Q 19Charlie Barnett, who plays Alan in Russian Doll, spent three seasons as Peter Mills on which NBC drama?
Chicago Fire
Chicago Fire cast him as a firefighter and paramedic from 2012 to 2015, and he later played a Jedi Knight in a Star Wars series.
Q 20Which L. M. Montgomery novel, a childhood favorite of Nadia's, does she give to John's daughter in Russian Doll?
Emily of New Moon
Emily of New Moon, published in 1923, follows an orphan girl sent to live with relatives on a Prince Edward Island farm.
East Berlin is where his Ghanaian grandmother Agnes was a graduate student, and where her friends were planning a tunnel under the Wall.
Q 24To which European capital does Nadia take Maxine in Russian Doll's second season to trace her grandmother's past?
Budapest
Budapest also gave the season its last big location, an underground cistern where the closing sequence of the finale was filmed.
Q 25Which real New York group does Nadia enlist to track down Chez in 1982 in Russian Doll?
Guardian Angels
Guardian Angels wear red berets and were founded in New York in 1979 by Curtis Sliwa, who went on to lose the city's 2021 mayoral election.
Q 26Which former talk-show host voices the subway announcements in the second season of Russian Doll?
Rosie O'Donnell
Rosie O'Donnell is heard but never seen in the role, and she had been a guest at the premiere of the first season three years earlier.
Q 27Which series beat Russian Doll, Barry and The Good Place to the 2019 Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series?
Fleabag
Fleabag won four awards at the main ceremony, including the lead actress prize for which Natasha Lyonne was also nominated.
Q 28Russian Doll's first-season finale is named after which princess of Greek myth, who helped Theseus escape the Minotaur?
Ariadne
Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth, a fitting title for the episode in which Nadia and Alan finally escape.
Q 29Whose Piano Concerto No. 4 plays each time Alan restarts his day in the first season of Russian Doll?
Beethoven
Beethoven wrote the concerto in G major, and the production chose it as Alan's own reset cue to set against the pop song that greets Nadia.
Q 30Nadia Vulvokov, the heroine of Russian Doll, earns her living as a software engineer making what?
Video games
Video games are her trade, and she tackles the loop like a programmer, dying again and again until she can work out its rules.