‘Poker Face’ Is Rian Johnson’s Modern Take on Retro Mystery

When Rian Johnson met Natasha Lyonne at a book party thrown by his wife, Karina Longworth, he quickly bonded with the Russian Doll cocreator and star over their shared love of classic television mystery shows like Murder, She Wrote, Magnum P.I., and Columbo. That night, Johnson shared with Lyonne an idea he had to make a case-of-the-week detective show for the modern age. “I was thinking about what makes those shows tick and most of them are really kind of stealth hangout shows,” Johnson tells Vanity Fair. “They’re all anchored by an incredibly charismatic, unique personality…. When I saw Russian Doll, I just realized this persona and this presence and this magnetic charisma that’s so unique that Natasha has onscreen. I thought she could do this, she could be the keystone of a show like this.” They met up not long after and hashed out an idea for a character that Lyonne could play who has an uncanny ability to know when someone is lying. 

Then the pandemic struck, and in between baking bread (like the rest of us) and writing the next installment of his successful Knives Out franchise (not so much like the rest of us), Johnson hammered out a draft of what would become the pilot episode for Poker Face, a star-studded 10-episode mystery series that drops its first four episodes January 26 on Peacock. “I don’t think Natasha actually thought anything would come of it,” says Johnson. “I think she was very surprised when I gave her a script like six months later.” Surprised though she might have been, Lyonne jumped at the chance to work with Johnson and agreed to join Poker Face as its star and executive producer. “I just loved the idea of collaborating with Rian, and I was very moved that he wanted to do this together because he just felt like such a wonderful person to know for a long time.” 

After two seasons playing a jaded New Yorker stuck in a time loop in Russian Doll, Lyonne was also eager to dig into a different kind of character. In Poker Face, Lyonne plays Charlie, an easygoing casino worker who finds herself in a bit of trouble following the death of her friend (Dascha Polanco) and goes on the run in her sky blue Plymouth Barracuda. Along the way, Charlie takes viewers to spots often overlooked on the map—a highway rest stop or a rundown Irish pub—where she can’t help but fall in with a colorful cast of characters and get wrapped up in solving their crimes. “Charlie lives in the sun,” says Lyonne. “She has a basic belief in people’s underlying goodness. It’s not cynical.”

Poker Face is Johnson’s first TV show—he previously directed a few episodes of Breaking Bad—but he says it wasn’t so much that he had been itching to create something in the medium, but rather that he wanted to recreate the pleasure he had felt as a kid of sitting on his couch week after week and watching a familiar character travel to new places and interact with surprising guest stars. The writer-director experienced a number of firsts while making the show, including working in his first writers room. To help him, sisters Nora Zuckerman and Lilla Zuckerman, who have written and produced for shows including Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Suits, joined the production as executive producers and showrunners. “The Zucks are two halves of one brain,” says Johnson, adding that they “showed me the ropes in terms of how to put together a room and how to work in that environment and get what I want using a group of writers, which was a whole new ball of wax for me.” 

Each episode of Poker Face follows the “howcatchem” format popularized by shows like Columbo, rather than the whodunit structure that Johnson so cleverly twists and inverts in the Knives Out movies. In the pilot, for example, viewers watch Polanco’s Natalie get killed after she discovers a secret inside the small-town Nevada casino where she works. Then, the show flashes back to the beginning of the timeline to explain how Charlie gets involved and, ultimately, solves the mystery of Natalie’s death. “There’s a lot of reasons I like that format,” says Johnson. “The big one is because I really love the idea of getting great guest stars for every episode, as opposed to the whodunit where you have to juggle five or six suspects to make it satisfying. I wanted to be able to create a real meal for actors to come in and feast on if they’re going to be the guest star.”  

It must have worked because Poker Face managed to land some bold-named guest stars. Lyonne and Benjamin Bratt, who plays the casino’s head of security, are the only characters from the first episode, which also stars Adrien Brody, who recur through the rest of the season. In the second episode, Charlie travels to a dusty rest stop where she meets Hong Chau as a long-haul trucker named Marge who is arrested for the murder of the local Subway employee. Then Charlie’s off to a Texas BBQ joint, where Lil Rel Howery plays the brother of a pitmaster who’s gone vegan. Later in the season, Charles Melton plays a worker at a go-kart track, and Ellen Barkin, Tim Meadows, and Jameela Jamil show up for a story set at a dinner theater. For both Lyonne and Johnson, it was important to bring in people they’d worked with before. Chloë Sevigny, who acted in Russian Doll, appears in episode four as the frontwoman for a past-its-prime heavy metal band. Meanwhile, Johnson got to direct Joseph Gordon Levitt (who stars in episode nine) for the first time since his 2012 film, Looper. And Noah Segan, who has appeared in nearly every one of Johnson’s projects, makes an appearance in the pilot episode. “It really is a gang’s all here type of thing for me, and that’s really what I love so much,” says Lyonne. Johnson adds, “The whole thing felt like a family affair.” He credits casting directors Mary Vernieu and Bret Howe—with whom he also worked on Knives Out and its sequel Glass Onion—with wrangling the task of finding essentially an entirely new cast for each episode. “We really got an amazing group of folks.” 

Given Johnson’s recent work in the big-budget film world, it should come as no surprise that Poker Face was essentially shot like 10 mini movies. Each episode takes place in an entirely new setting with that rotating cast of guest stars. For production designer Judy Rhee, that meant tackling the daunting task of creating expansive worlds that would only be used for one 60-minute episode of television. Most of Poker Face was filmed near New York City—with trips to Nevada and New Mexico—and Rhee managed to find locations that could double for Texas and the Adirondack Mountains. “We had no standing sets,” says Johnson. “Even a procedural usually has the DNA lab or something where you can set a bunch of exposition, and we had nothing. The scope and scale of what Judy and her team pulled off is absolutely incredible…. All the departments were tasked with these gargantuan creative challenges and every single one of them really brought it.” 

Johnson, who directed the pilot as well as episodes two and nine, also set a visual language for the show that helps give each episode its own sense of place, whether that is the vast desert of Laughlin, Nevada, or the green fields of Texas. He also used the camera—which after the first act follow Charlie as she’s encountering the same chain of events—to reveal new details about each murder plot as the episodes unfold. “Rian has such a beautiful style that he’s established with Steve Yedlin, his cinematographer over the years,” says Lyonne, who cowrote and directed episode eight, which stars Nick Nolte, Cherry Jones, and Luis Guzmán. “He just composes these shots that are such Rian Johnson shots, and the tone is right in this really enjoyable pocket for the audience that’s still super heady and elevated, so it’s really fun to jump into that style week to week even though you get to completely build a new world.” When it came to handing off the story to other filmmakers—including Zola director Janicza Bravo, who directs the finale—Johnson says, “I was looking to pull in directors who I felt like had really strong storytelling and visual sensibilities and kind of let them make a movie.” 

Though Poker Face can be watched like a traditional procedural—where Charlie’s arc happens in the course of one episode—Johnson teases, “I can promise that the finale comes back to the story of the pilot in a way that I think is very satisfying.” Now that they’ve worked together on Poker Face, it seems Lyonne has gotten her wish and joined Johnson’s creative family. “We just had a blast making the show,” says Johnson, adding that he’d be lucky to “get old” making it. “If we’re allowed to keep going with this, it feels like something that could be endlessly fun to play with.”