LOS ANGELES (AP) — Natasha Lyonne, who is known for her quick wit and wisecracking delivery, now has the chance to play a character with a personality attribute that she hasn’t before in the Peacock series “Poker Face.” Charlie, a character in Lyonne, enjoys people.
Charlie still has his share of one-liners, but Lyonne claims that the character was somewhat influenced by Jeff Bridges’ well-known The Dude character from “The Big Lebowski.”
She’s “a person a little bit set back who’s kind of got sun on their face,” said Lyonne, “I’m usually more of a city slicker and someone who avoids getting hit by taxis and runs down in a subway.”
Adds creator Rian Johnson, “Charlie’s very open. She’s very sunny. That kind of blew Natasha’s mind. She’s like, ‘Oh, this will be a new thing for me to play. I like people.’ The natural kind of like acidity and sharpness of Natasha’s personality, combined with a character who has a genuinely sunny outlook … I find it’s super watchable.”
“Poker Face” is a mystery series, so it fits Johnson’s wheelhouse, as the writer, director of “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion.”
Charlie has a remarkable capacity to instantly detect deception. She gets in her car and starts driving away from problems after the events of the first episode cause her to flee from a mafia boss and his enforcer, who are both played by Benjamin Bratt. Each standalone episode features a murder, new characters, and, of course, falsehoods that motivate Charlie to try to piece together what happened.
Johnson calls it an unapologetically procedural howdunit. Charlie must determine the murderer’s method even though he knows who did it.
“We follow the same format with every single episode. We show the murder, then we flashback and see where Charlie was during the murder. We catch up with the murder and then she solves it. Keeping that procedural consistency was a big, big deal to me because when I tune in to TV, part of what I love is hanging out with the same friends over and over. It’s a comforting pattern of getting a new thrill from something that I know what to expect from every single week. There’s great joy in that… I embrace it completely.”
Over the course of the 10-episode first season, Charlie encounters a different mystery each week. Notable guest stars include Lil Rey Henry, Tim Meadows, Luis Guzman, Chloe Sevigny, and even Nick Nolte, who makes an appearance in an episode that Lyonne directed and which she called a “sensational” experience.
“Strong recommend for literally everyone. Now, granted, that might get chaotic because Nick likes somebody who is pretty serious, but yeah, I would say I recommend it to all hobbyists.”
[embedpost slug=”natasha-lyonne-on-landing-rosie-odonnell-for-secret-cameo-in-russian-doll/”]
