I can hear Natasha Lyonne well before I see her. “This jacket is maybe the craziest jacket I’ve ever worn in my life,” she shouts, her New York–accented rasp carrying over the din of the Poker Face set. “I feel like an Oompa Loompa that is also Ray Liotta in Goodfellas in this outfit! Because of the starch!”
It’s a drizzly day in late November, and Lyonne is filming the eighth episode in Poker Face’s second season with John Cho on a cavernous Brooklyn soundstage. As the two reset for another take, Lyonne comments that she wishes a stack of prop money had more movement. “They don’t quite fan in the way I was hoping,” she says. From his director chair behind the monitor, Tony Tost, the season’s showrunner, remarks that Lyonne “thinks like a director.” (Indeed, the actor is involved on every level of the process, with executive producing, writing, and directing credits to her list of accomplishments.)
Poker Face is a collaboration between Lyonne and Knives Out impresario Rian Johnson. The weekly Colombo-esque whodunnit follows Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a woman whose uncanny ability to spot a lie routinely gets her in trouble. When we last saw Charlie, she’d solved her best friend’s murder (which served as the first season’s through line) and evaded the shady casino manager, played by Adrien Brody, who tried to have her killed. This season continues the murder-of-the-week format, with Charlie facing off with everyone from an evil quintuplet to a wicked elementary schooler—all while fleeing a crime syndicate called the Five Families.
When I first meet Lyonne, she is sitting in her dressing room, tights-clad legs propped up on the table. In between puffs of her pink vape, she talks at a machine-gun speed, riffing on everything from Neuralink to Nora Ephron. (I’m not the only one floored by her breadth of references. “What always blows me away about Natasha is how fast her brain works—and I think that’s something that has only gotten better as she’s gotten older,” the actor Clea DuVall, Lyonne’s longtime friend, tells Vogue. “She pulls out these things that you just can’t even believe.”) Prompted about the episode she’s filming with Cho, she says: “I think it’s one of the best episodes of the season. It’s a little bit like a David Mamet special, like The Spanish Prisoner. I love Ricky Jay, Rian loves Ricky Jay, who doesn’t love Ricky Jay? Only a deranged person,” before solemnly adding, “R.I.P.”
Lyonne is interested in exploring Charlie’s interiority this season. “[Rian] and I spend time delineating, holy shit, she’s been on the road for a minute now with no contact because the mob is on her tail. She’s really had a second to sit in that and is not the same person from season one,” she says. “Here, you’re finding her after something of a long journey. I would do this exercise, estimating how many cases she has closed off-screen in between the seasons, and what that does to a person.”
Lyonne and Johnson seek to give the lone wolf Charlie a modicum of stability this go around. Even out on the run, Lyonne notes, Charlie craves human connection.“She’s not someone who just wants to be left alone and sit in her room and read books, and write poetry or something,” Lyonne says. “She really loves life, loves people, loves getting in the mix. She wants friends.”
In reality, Poker Face is nothing if not an opportunity for Lyonne to work with her own good friends. This season, she tapped a cadre of pals for supporting roles, including John Mulaney, Katie Holmes, Cynthia Erivo, Richard Kind, Gabby Hoffman, Carol Kane, and Melanie Lynskey. She also created opportunities for her friends to explore other passions. After playing her estranged sister in season one, Clea DuVall returned, at Lyonne’s invitation, to direct an episode in season two. “Something that is really special about Natasha is how she wants the people around her to succeed,” DuVall says. “I was nervous about it because I love the show so much, but I also love Natasha so much, and I want to do a good job for her. She was just so supportive and awesome.”
Lyonne tends to dig into the philosophical with her projects. Russian Doll sent the actor down rabbit holes concerning “futurism and quantum physics and spirituality and philosophy and theology and recovery and mental health and trauma and friendship, nightlife, addiction, good times, jokes, sex, rock and roll, all of that shit”—and Poker Face is no different. “They’re both characters that are ultimately based on Elliott Gould’s performance as Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye,” she says of Charlie and her Russian Doll character, Nadia.
It’s that impulse to go deeper that makes Poker Face so compelling. In it, she manages to capture both the isolation of the social media era and its antidotes. “I think it’s true that none of us quite know what to do in this new world. We’re lonely in the horror that we witness from a distance on a daily basis,” she says. “Here in this show, what’s interesting is that idea of small good deeds on a human level that nobody needs to know about.” As ever, she takes solace in the philosophy of goodness. “One plus one always equals two. Karma is a mathematical equation,” she says. “Charlie maybe can’t save the world, but she can help out one good guy who doesn’t have a voice.”
