Coming off the initial success of “Poker Face” on Peacock, show creator Rian Johnson didn’t approach the new season with any desire to outdo himself. Instead, the goal was to “do what we [already] did in Season 1 and just do more of it.”
“The idea was not to build out some bigger mythology or to see where Charlie goes bigger with her arc,” Johnson said Saturday during the show’s PaleyFest panel at the Dolby Theatre. “The idea was just — ‘Let’s make some really kickass episodes, and let’s try something different with each episode.’ So every time the credits come up at the beginning, the viewer doesn’t know what they’re gonna get.”
Season 2 kicks off with the human lie detector Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) once again on the run from Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman). The action-packed season premiere features “Wicked” star Cynthia Erivo, who plays a set of sextuplets.
“We had a 10-day schedule to shoot that, which is a very fast schedule for the amount of script it was,” Johnson said. “It’s not like we were using high, crazy camera technology. It was literally leaving the camera there, Cynthia would do half of her scene, she would go and change and she somehow kept it all in her head and was the loveliest person in the world.”
Lyonne wears multiple hats on “Poker Face” as executive producer, director and writer, in addition to being the series’ lead star. Because the show brings in new guest stars every episode, Lyonne noted that the people everybody gets closest to are the crew — “because those are the people you’re seeing everyday.”
This season features a plethora of new guest stars, including John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, John Cho, Haley Joel Osment and Kumail Nanjiani. Nanjiani teased that the character he plays, Gator Joe, is an alligator-loving cop in the Florida Panhandle with frosted hair. He noted that Lyonne approached him for the role just six days before shooting — and did quick workwith dialect coach Liz Himelstein. Nanjiani joked that if he wasn’t able to pull off the accent in time, he would “just speak like a Pakistani guy who’s been in America for 20 years.”
“As soon as I started working on it, it was just too fun and too exciting to not fully commit to it,” he added. “It’s set over a few years with a baby alligator who grows up to a full size alligator over the course of the episode. So I got to work with the best in the biz, like these folks who are absolutely amazing, and also these giant alligator animatronics.”
As Nanjiani jumped into the role, he started having “weird” dreams revolving alligators.
“I wanted to have a real connection with this alligator and, like robots, I think alligators are terrifying and hideous. So I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to do it,’” Nanjiani said. “I had this dream that we had this kid and the kid was this hideous mixture of my cat and an alligator. I remember looking at it in the dream and feeling such love for it, I swear. Then the next day, I went and worked with these alligators and I loved [them].”
Johnson explained how the guest casting “inevitably” brought a mix of people they’ve worked with before and others that they’ve “always respected and hadn’t gotten the chance to work with.”
“To jump into something where you’re really carrying the entire episode as a guest star, and you’re being thrown into this crazy world and it’s just two weeks of shooting, that takes a high degree of difficulty,” Johnson added.
At the panel, Season 1’s Emmy-winning guest star Judith Light reminisced on working with Johnson and Lyonne when she played the politically radical Irene Smothers.
“You get to work in a system where you are getting to acknowledge a woman’s intuition,” Light said. “It’s not just that [Charlie] knows that somebody’s lying, but it’s her intuition. And you get to see that and how that works, how that operates.”
Season 2 also marks a “But I’m a Cheerleader” reunion with Lyonne, guest star Melanie Lynskey and director Clea DuVall, who previously guest starred as Charlie’s estranged sister in the Season 1 finale.
Said DuVall: “Because I had met the crew the previous year, it was such a warm environment to walk into to get less of that first day of school vibe. It was really fun and I got to do things as a director that I hadn’t done before.”
