Face value
As Natasha Lyonne’s human lie detector Charlie returns to solve more mysteries in season two of Poker Face, creator and director Rian Johnson reflects on the success of the ‘how catch ’em’ series and discusses working with many versions of Cynthia Erivo.
When he first began pitching the idea behind Poker Face, Rian Johnson remembers being met with a lot of “confusion” over his idea for an original series that was openly and positively inspired by 1970s murder-mystery series Columbo.
Yet two years after the show first debuted on Peacock, with season two now rolling out, Poker Face has become widely recognised as the saviour of the case-of-the-week murder-mystery format.
“It’s really wonderful for me, just as a fan of the form, to see a lot more shows like that, and that episodic structure coming out,” the series creator, writer, director and executive producer tells DQ. “When we were pitching season one, it was very much an odd duck. It was something that actually generated some confusion in terms of, ‘Wait a minute, why are people going to keep tuning in if it’s not about the big case of the season?’ So it’s been really fun to see audiences respond to it.
“I love the ‘how catch ’em’ form. I feel like it’s just this endless playground to find new little variations within each episode. I love each episode being a little microcosm of a different world. I love getting to work with all these different amazing actors. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been a delight.”
Poker Face stars fellow writer, director and exec producer Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black) as Charlie, who has an extraordinary ability to determine when someone is lying. In season one, she hits the road in her Plymouth Barracuda after going on the run from a casino boss following a suspicious death, and with every stop she encounters a new cast of characters and strange crimes she can’t help but solve.
Season two picks up with Charlie still on the run and jumping into a new mystery in every episode. But Johnson, Lyonne and the show’s fellow execs and writers made the decision to dispatch with the overarching mob boss story at the end of S2’s third episode, after which the show really boils down its Columbo roots.
“It was a big decision,” Johnson admits. “It wasn’t like we sat down in the writers room at the beginning of the season with this in mind. It came very organically after the first few episodes. And honestly, when we first sat down in the writers room, I didn’t even want to think about the bigger story. I was just like, ‘Let’s come up with 12 terrific individual episodes and we’ll figure it out.’
“Very quickly, every time I started thinking about the gunmen showing up at the end of every episode and the idea of a season finale that’s a confrontation with a mob boss, my shoulders slumped a little. I’m like, ‘Well, it feels like there’s maybe a more interesting way to go.’”
Ending the serialised story also took the pressure off Charlie, Johnson explains, putting the decision for the character to continue moving on at the end of each episode firmly in her own hands, rather than her being forced back on the road to stay ahead of her pursuers.
“Every place she stops, she’s interrogating that place not just as a hiding place, but as a potential home. ‘Could I belong here?’ That lets you dig a little deeper into some of the relationships she forms, both with the places and the people she meets,” he continues. “So it ended up being really beneficial for the character and I hope a little more fun and surprising for the audience because it’s not just doing what season one did.”
Charlie’s mission to find her place in the world after leaving Las Vegas in the very first episode remains at the heart of the series, while the introduction of Good Buddy, a faceless voice on her CB radio played by Steve Buscemi, is used to frame each episode in terms of her needs and desires.
“It does come to something of a fun conclusion at the end of the season, so I will tease that,” Johnson says. “To say more, that would be telling. But other than that, I really wanted to focus on episode to episode, which is really just the engine of the show, making sure, in every episode, you saw a little bit of growth from Charlie and got a great story with a great mystery.”
Each episode’s setup is “straight out of the Columbo playbook.” The first scenes introduce a new world and a fresh group of characters before a murder takes place, with Charlie then arriving into the story.
The show also uses a flashback mechanism to reveal how Charlie’s movements overlap with the murder, “which is something a little unique,” Johnson notes, “and helps us out in terms of her forming a personal relationship with somebody involved in the crime. But that opening act is straight out of the ‘how catch ’em’ playbook.”
The start of each episode gives Johnson, Lyonne and the show’s writing staff the chance to build the characters that they hope to persuade some of their A-List contacts to play. Guest stars in S2 include Adrienne C Moore, Awkwafina, BJ Novak, Corey Hawkins, Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito, Haley Joel Osment, John Cho, John Mulaney, Justin Theroux, Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, Lili Taylor, Margo Martindale, Melanie Lynskey, Rhea Perlman, Richard Kind, Simon Helberg and Taylor Schilling.
“One of the things I was excited about with this show is the idea of guest stars and the idea of being able to really draw on Natasha and my contacts list, to try to draw in some friends who we really want to work with,” Johnson says. “The nice thing about these episodes, if you come in as a guest star, you are really the star of that episode and you get to own it. It’s also siloed off, so you can take a big swing like Kumail does this season in The Taste of Human Blood [episode four].
“He’s just swinging for the fences with his bonkers character and doing a Florida accent. I think he felt permission to do that because he knows it’s not like if this goes well, he’s on the hook for doing this for a whole season. It’s like, ‘No, this is one episode. It’s two weeks of your life. Have some fun. Do something you wouldn’t usually do.’”
In the writers room, actors might be used as references for a new character, but the show can’t rely on casting in-demand stars months out from production. Instead, one of the “interesting, fun” parts of the process is casting the show week to week, “laying the railroad track as the train is rolling down towards us,” says Johnson. “It’s sometimes slightly chaotic, but also in a wonderful way.
“All these actors we’re drawing in are some of the best actors out there. They’re very much in demand, and if we tried to get a commitment from them six months in advance, they’re not going to really know what they’re doing. But if we text them and we’re like, ‘Hey, are you busy in two weeks?’ we have a much better shot at, ‘Oh yeah, I could come out and do that.’ It’s a combination of a lot of work from [casting directors] Mary Vernieu and Bret Howe, and Natasha and I texting friends.”
With Lyonne’s Charlie as the sole recurring character across two seasons of Poker Face, each episode serves almost as a pilot for a new show. “It’s what’s hard, but it’s also the pleasures of it,” Johnson says of starting each instalment with little continuity from the previous story.
The fact that Charlie isn’t a cop, and it isn’t her job to solve the crimes, means the writers can focus on the relationships she forms. “It’s really nice because it means we can’t cheat and come up with a good mystery and then just glue a superficial relationship on,” Johnson says. “The basis of every episode has to be who does she connect with and why does that draw her into solving the crime? That also helps because it immediately makes you define who that guest star character is.”
The episodic nature of Poker Face means the series can also play with tone and genre in each outing, from the gothic-horror-flavoured Last Looks (episode two, directed by Lyonne) to The Taste of Human Blood, which Johnson compares to an episode of The Simpsons. “It’s just a full chaotic comedy,” he says. “It’s the most joke-a-minute, full-on comedy Poker Face episode we’ve ever done. Then we have a heist episode later in the season that very much digs into those tropes. So in that way, in every episode, we’re letting ourselves jump into a different playground and giving the audience something different.”
The endless creative possibilities are limited, typically, by time and budget. “This year, we really wanted to do a cruise ship episode, and Jeff Bernstein, our line producer, was just like, ‘Er, no,’” Johnson jokes. “You are ultimately making a TV show and we don’t have the Universal lot to just run around and play in. Our production designer, Judy Rhee, worked absolute miracles both seasons, and the fact that there are no standing sets in this show and that every episode is in such a different type of hero locale… Judy and her team, while managing to still be lovely people, worked absolute miracles.”
Johnson found his own role limited on season two as production almost entirely overlapped with filming in London for his next feature film, Wake Up Dead Man, the third instalment of his Knives Out mystery franchise.
The one episode he was able to shoot, however, proved to be one of the most technically tricky in the show’s run, with Wicked star Erivo playing five different characters in S2 opener The Game is a Foot.
The story introduces Amber Kazinsky (Erivo), a former child actress who cares for Norma, her abusive dying mother. When Norma cuts Amber and her sisters Bebe, Cece and Delia (all Erivo) out of her will in favour of Felicity Price (Erivo again), Amber discovers Felicity is a long-lost sister and determines to lure her to her death. Charlie, a friend of Delia, then attends the funeral and detects all is not as it seems among the surviving sisters.
Johnson had wanted to work with Erivo “for years” after recognising the British star’s “extraordinary” talent. Specifically, he also believed she had the skills to play five different characters in a shoot running to just 10 days. “We didn’t have the budget to have a bunch of technology, so it’s not like we had motion-control cameras or something,” he says about replicating Erivo on screen. “It really was just old-school split screens, setting up three cameras and then putting sandbags on them so they don’t move while she goes to do a half-hour makeup change and comes back and performs the other half of it.
“Cynthia really held all of that in her head and managed to give these amazingly differentiated performances. Just logistically, the fact that she made this work, it was just lovely to work with her the whole time. I was pretty dazzled by her.”
Directing an episode of Poker Face doesn’t come with a strict rulebook, as Johnson encourages everyone behind the camera to follow the “visual vibes” of the show and shoot what is best for their episode. But when Lyonne steps up to direct, “I stand back and watch and learn,” he says.
“As good as she is in front of the camera, it’s fun for me to see my friend really where they were meant to be when she’s directing. She has a brain that hums at a high frequency, and directing, even more than performing, gives that brain a machine to plug into that really uses all its facilities. It’s so much fun to watch her prep and direct – it’s very different from the way that I approach it – and because of that, I always tend to learn a lot from it.”
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Columbo: The inspiration for Poker Face, the classic detective series stars Peter Falk as the disheveled but brilliant Lieutenant Columbo, with each episode revealing the culprit up front before following Columbo as he solves the case.
Monk: Tony Shalhoub plays Adrian Monk, a detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder who solves crimes with his unique perspective and attention to detail.
Murder, She Wrote: Angela Lansbury is Jessica Fletcher, a mystery novelist who finds murder wherever she turns and has a habit of solving the case.
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tagged in: Cynthia Erivo, Natasha Lyonne, Peacock, Poker Face, Rian Johnson