A guest appearance on mystery series Poker Face is quickly becoming one of the most in-demand roles among Hollywood A-listers. Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Melanie Lynskey, Kumail Nanjiani and Justin Theroux are just a few of the bold-faced names who will appear as victims, killers or occasionally both on the show’s second season.
Speaking at a PaleyFest LA panel on Saturday at Hollywood’s Dolby Theater, showrunner Rian Johnson and producer-star Natasha Lyonne were joined by season two actors Lynskey, Nanjiani, Haley Joel Osment, John Cho, GaTa, Clea Duvall and Judith Light, who won an Emmy for her first season appearance.
While Johnson was careful not to offer any spoilers, he did give fans a preview of what to expect from the upcoming season. “We had so much fun making that first season. I feel like in the second season, the big thing I wanted to do was just kind of do what we did in season one, but just do more of it,” he said.
Inspired by shows such as Columbo and The Rockford Files, Johnson reassured fans that the second season would indeed give them more of what they loved from the first. The series is a case-of-the-week style mystery centering on Lyonne’s Charlie Cale — an on-the-run casino worker with an innate ability to detect when someone is lying — and the colorful characters she meets along the way.
“The idea was not to build some bigger mythology or let’s see where Charlie goes with a bigger arc. The idea was just let’s make some really kickass, wonderful episodes and let’s try something very different with each episode,” he continued. “So every time the credits come up at the beginning, you, as a viewer, you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
The PaleyFest audience got an early look at the second season’s first episode, where Erivo plays quintuplets who occasionally pretend to be each other.
Lyonne shared that Johnson thrived directing an episode where the same actor must play multiple different characters in the same scene. “I’ve never seen Rian so in his element. I would argue that this episode, “The Game is a Foot,” is quite possibly the most Rian Johnson thing to ever Rian Johnson,” she told the crowd. “He had 87 screens within screens to figure out how the whole game and magic trick would work. So it was amazing.”
GaTa, Haley Joel Osment, Melanie Lynskey, Judith Light, Rian Johnson, Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, Aidy Bryant, Kumail Nanjiani and John Cho
The Paley Center For Media
While the show boasts one of the strongest casts on television, Nanjiani shared how quickly guest stars could be added to an episode, remembering, “I just got a text from you [Lyonne] on a Friday. You were like, ‘Hey, do you want to be in Poker Face on Thursday?’ And I was like, ‘How long can I wait so that it doesn’t seem too desperate?’”
Nanjiani also gave a preview of what audiences could expect from his character, teasing that upon reading the script, “It was this cop in the Florida panhandle with tattoos and frosted hair, and his name was Gator Joe and his best friend is an alligator. I was like, ‘Did you send this one to me by mistake?’ People don’t see me and go, ‘Hey, that looks like a Florida cop.’”
He added, “I love playing Gator Joe. I love this guy. I had to shave my arms and legs to get tattoos on and then I just walked around with all these tattoos. People were scared of me.”
Also during the conversation — moderated by Aidy Bryant — Light, who played a killer in season one, explained what she thinks is the secret that makes Charlie Cale such a compelling character.
“You get to work in a system where you are getting to acknowledge a woman’s intuition, which is what you [Lyonne] do and what you play,” Light said. “It’s not just that she knows that somebody’s lying but it’s her intuition, and you get to see that and you get to see how that works and how that operates and that fits into the whole dynamic of the show.”
The second season of Poker Face debuts its first three episodes on Peacock on May 8.