Natasha Lyonne unlocks TV’s newest ’70s-inspired crime thriller

At first glance Poker Face is a very modern American crime thriller. Pushed deep into the grit of backwater America under the metaphorical boot-heel of creator Rian Johnson and star Natasha Lyonne. But Poker Face is also writ large from the annals of 1970s small-screen Hollywood, a world where the eccentric Lt Columbo was all-knowing.

The series, which stars Lyonne, Benjamin Bratt and Ron Perlman, was borne out of Lyonne’s love of the classic crime, and noir genres. “My love of Peter Falk, all the Cassavetes films and Wim Wenders, my love of detectives like Philip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye and Chinatown and Humphrey Bogart,” she says.

Natasha Lyonne: “I think people often think that I am my characters, and they are me ... I know it’s not true.”Credit: AP

“I think naturally, my way into understanding my job has always been very auteur-based, for lack of a better term,” Lyonne adds. “So, I see it as one big job. You know what I mean? It doesn’t fully matter what specific aspect of the job you are doing. For me now, it’s about which collaborators I’m getting to make things with, and that the way we understand the material is very 360 degrees.”

The series is a collaboration between Lyonne and writer/director/producer Rian Johnson, best known for his work on the middle third of the final Star Wars trilogy, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Star Wars prequel Rogue One and, more recently, the whodunit films Knives Out and Glass Onion.

The last two of those – the beginnings of a mystery film franchise starring Daniel Craig as master detective Benoit Blanc – is in many ways the jumping off point for Poker Face. Not that the two worlds even remotely resemble one another, but both lean deeply into Johnson’s adoration of classic crime whodunits, like Columbo or the adventures of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

Lyonne and Johnson became friends via Johnson’s wife, film journalist Karina Longworth, who notably hosts the film history podcast You Must Remember This. Lyonne had wanted to option an episode of the podcast as a film, and ended up on the sofa with the couple talking about their shared love of the 1970s.

“We struck up a friendship, and then we would start meeting for these dinners and you just felt genuinely inspired,” Lyonne says. “I had an old shrink tell me that relationships thrive when people have information for each other, and that they dissolve when that information runs out. What we have, it’s very sparky.”

The rubber really hit the road, Lyonne says, when Johnson mailed her a script based on their conversations: Poker Face. “It was so much better than the ideas we had been discussing because it was completely original; it’s the most generous gift one artist can give another, saying, hey, I wrote all of this down for you, for us to make.”

And in the world of Poker Face, in which Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a casino worker with an innate ability to detect lies, all roads seem to lead to the iconic television series Columbo, in which Peter Falk played Lt Columbo, a homicide detective working for the LAPD. The series was a “howcatchem”, as opposed to a “whodunit”, in which the perpetrator was revealed to the audience and the format instead followed the detective’s genius in the assembly of the clues.

At just 43 years old it seems mathematically impossible that Lyonne is obsessed with Columbo, but Hollywood being Hollywood, who are we to argue? “Thank you for telling me that I’m too young, I don’t hear that enough any more,” she laughs. “I think I have better hair than Peter Falk ... but he’s somebody whose work just makes so much sense to me instinctually.

Lyonne, right, as Charlie Cale and Luis Guzman in Poker Face.Credit: Peacock

“And it’s not just comfort food; when you’ve got those scenes with him and John Cassavetes going at it [in what many fans consider the best Columbo episode ever, Étude In Black, in which Cassavetes plays murderous conductor Alex Benedict] they are so loaded with history somehow,” Lyonne says. (The episode also guest starred Blythe Danner and Myrna Loy.)

“The quality of the actors who are in that TV series are extraordinary,” Lyonne adds, noting that her childhood was also heavily shaped by The Godfather and Scarface and Rocky, and “I remember as a kid also really loving Bette Davis and Jessica Lange just as much.”

Perhaps the most visually striking aspect of Poker Face is its setting and colour palette, eschewing the often-too-perfect picture of suburban America that television usually prefers, for a route through more authentic American back roads, where the sun burns hard, and the air is thick with grit and dust.

“Judy Rhee, who’s our production designer, had a huge task because there’s not much time to prep; and for each episode, you have to build a completely different world each time,” Lyonne says. “It is a huge undertaking to turn this primarily upstate New York location into 10 different worlds so quickly, but Rian set the tone with [cinematographer] Steve Yedlin, and Judy is incredibly detail-oriented.

“I think the pilot they really made it their business to establish that it was going to be shot and look like one of their films,” Lyonne adds. “That that’s why it’s so important that you have somebody who’s a giant set the tone of a series like this because then at least, there’s a template that everyone’s aware when they’re not meeting that goal.”

Lyonne came to the series off the back of Russian Doll, a series which she co-created, produced, wrote and directed. On Poker Face Lyonne is producing and starring, and is also directing an episode. Clearly she wants more on her plate than just performing in front of the camera.

“On the most basic level, [doing all of those things] is a lot of fun, and it’s really how I understand the work now,” Lyonne says. “My discovery in the Russian Doll writers’ room was that by the end of writing the season and prepping to direct episodes and producing it and casting it and hiring all the department heads, I really understood the character.

“Often, you’ll see in a script an ellipsis in the dialogue, dot, dot, dot, and you go to the writer, and you say, what does she mean here? And sometimes I would discover that they didn’t know the answer,” Lyonne adds. “Once I was the writer, or the producer, or the director, I would be able to build a bridge when we were actually shooting, and that would make for a more cohesive character arc.”

Lyonne too has led somewhat of a storied life; her early work was with Woody Allen, Mike Leigh and Paul Reubens; later she starred in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. “I think people often think that I am my characters, and they are me,” Lyonne says. “I know who I am. So, I know it’s not true. It’s always for me, a little similar to a bit of a Mae West game, like I’ve architected a bit of a drag character.

“I’m much more of an introvert and a writer and I stay at home all day and just smoke my cigarettes in peace and try not to talk as much as possible,” she adds. “It’s like you figure out this game, in a way, after 30 years. For me, it’s always about being able to tether to some lineage where I can see the range of what you can get away with. It’s a long way of saying I love the movies.”

Poker Face is now streaming on Stan. Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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