@Courtesy of Peacock

Poker face :Starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, the casino worker with an uncanny ability to spot liars, the show follows her escapades as she evades the dangerous casino head of security Cliff LeGrand (portrayed by Benjamin Bratt) and uncovers various killers. Charlie’s back on the lam after a new twist of fate at the end of season one.

Season two kicks off with Charlie dodging a threatening call from crime boss Beatrix Halp (Rhea Perlman), who’s tangled in a conflict with four other major crime families.

Refusing to work for Halp, Charlie hits the road in her Plymouth Barracuda, once again finding herself entangled in murder mysteries.

The official synopsis teases: “With her extraordinary ability to detect when someone is lying, Charlie Cale continues her journey on the road across the country, investigating crimes along the way.”

Press Conference with Actor Natasha Lyonne and Creator Rian Johnson

Q: How did you and the writing team challenge yourselves to keep Charlie’s emotional journey fresh while still delivering those signature Rian Johnson plot puzzles?

Rian Johnson: The show has a very Colombo style structure. One of the tweaks to the structure, though, is these flashbacks where Charlie and other characters have to meet. We see her get to know either the victim or the killer and form a relationship with them, and that’s what draws her into solving the crime. That’s important because she’s not a cop, it’s not her job to solve the crime. She needs an emotional way in every single episode. Opening up the season in a way that makes Charlie try to find her place in the world, it also gives us more ammunition for what makes each episode perfect for finding an emotional way in to finding the killer. It’s not just sprinkling more existential stuff on top of it. It actually feeds into what as writers we found each episode has to have for it to work.

Q: I find it interesting that the majority of the episodes take place within the world of entertainment in one way or the other. Movies, sports, TV, music, award shows, etc. What was your intention behind it besides it being great fun, and what makes the entertainment business such a great backdrop for a murder mystery show?

Natasha Lyonne: I think it’s funny that we’re categorizing all of those things as entertainment. I guess life, not to get existential, is always entertainment on some level. 

Rian Johnson: There’s a few. Even when we do entertainment, we do technically. We do sports. We do an awards show. Part of the thing with Poker Face is if we’re going to do sports, it’s not going to be a major league team. It’s seeing what the lives are like of people who are grinding it out each day. The awards show is a Florida local cop competition. We dig down into a little closer to the ground in terms of where life is actually lived.

Natasha Lyonne: It’s also about people on an ego trip, wanting to play the big shot at life. There’s something about this kind of fantasy, the delusion that it’ll feel just right if I hit that sweet spot of making it, you know? It doesn’t happen, folks. So it’s no surprise that bodies pile up when egos run high. Behind all that is why murder in the first place? That’s really the thing that you’re presenting with this show. You’ve got to have a motive, and that motive is some sort of fishbowl big win.

Q: How did you choose that vintage visual tone for the show?

Rian Johnson: I really wanted each director to come in, look at the script as their own little movie, and shoot it however it’s appropriate style-wise. But it’s interesting because a style does emerge. MAybe part of it is the vibe of the show, a small-town vibe instead of the big city. 

Q: There is the murder mystery where the audience knows immediately who the culprit is or like in Knives Out nobody knows, and you’re constantly being led down this mouse trap to see who’s going to do it. What is more interesting for you both as a creator and as a viewer to experience that? 

Rian Johnson: This is endlessly fascinating to me as a puzzle aficionado, someone who has fallen into writing murder mysteries for a living. This magical thing that they developed with Colombo, where you show the killer, you show how they did it, and then you would think on paper that wouldn’t work. Where is your tension? Why is the audience going to keep watching? And yet it works so well, I would argue that it works much better than the whodunit form. I actually think it is a much stronger narrative engine than the whodunit. I do subscribe to Hitchcock’s view of suspense being a more strong engine to build something around than surprise. We got a bunch of talented writers in the room, Natasha and I are in there with them, riffing. To a certain extent is putting a bunch of ideas up on the whiteboard and figuring it out. 

@Courtesy of Peacock

Q: When you do your treasure map, do you have them in mind or do you do your map first and reach out to the guest stars? 

Rian Johnson: Very rarely will we have something like: “Okay: It’s got to be this person in this episode.” Because the reality is the casting process for this show is incredibly chaotic, we don’t cast everyone at the beginning of the season and have it all up on a neat, organized chart. We’re casting week to week. It’s very fun, it ends up letting us get people who we probably wouldn’t be able to get if we booked them eight months ago because it’s just like: ”Oh, yeah, I’m available. I like you guys. I’ll come to New York for a week and shoot this.” Because of that, we don’t know who we’re going to get. It would not be a good idea to plan an episode around a certain actor too specifically. I’ll refer back to Colombo one more time. Peter Falk brought in Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes for an iconic episode.That’s the other element of the casting and the reason it works. It’s a certain percentage of looking at lists and doing the casting process but it’s also a certain percentage of: “Oh, you were hanging out last night, you ran into so-and-so, and they’d love to be in the show. Let’s text him and see if they’re available next week”.

Natasha Lyonne: What’s amazing is just the actual process of casting people you never would’ve thought of. It’s just such a special show in that sense, it’s really two weeks of work. People get to stretch and do things that they never would’ve done before. 

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Here’s the trailer of Pier Face Season 2: