‘Poker Face’ Creator Rian Johnson And Star Natasha Lyonne On Collaborating To Give Life To The Classic TV Murder Mystery: “They Say Everything Old Is New Again”
01.06.2023 - 16:19
/ deadline.com
In a studio overlooking Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Rian Johnson is strapped to a lie detector machine. Next to him at the controls sits Natasha Lyonne, twiddling the device’s knobs with all the sinister intent of a supervillain. This photoshoot tableau is, of course, ripped right from the Meet the Parents Ben Stiller-Robert De Niro interrogation scene. Next, in an homage to the pithiest of TV detective tropes, Lyonne will pose at a typewriter, fake-talking into a rotary-dial phone. The visual nod this time goes to Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.
In fact, the late, great Lansbury is connective tissue for Johnson and Lyonne. Lansbury and Lyonne appeared briefly together in Johnson’s film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, on a Zoom call playing the mystery game Among Us with Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc.
Little did we know back when that film premiered, that Johnson was sitting on an Easter egg with that scene. Only later, when he aired his debut television creation, Poker Face, would the presence of Lyonne in Glass Onion explain itself.
In Poker Face, Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a woman who just knows when a person is lying. Her savant skill allows her to clean up at — you guessed it — poker, and in the process, she makes an enemy of an undesirable casino boss. But in classic ‘mystery of the week’ style, that’s just the ‘B’ plot rumbling in the background. As Charlie is forced to throw away her cellphone and go on the run, she cannot help but stumble upon liars at every small-town stop along the way. And where there are liars, there are, coincidentally, many murders for her to solve. From a couple of geriatric terrorists (Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson), to a tortured vegan BBQ