Lyonne wants to grow old with ‘Poker Face’
Creator Johnson sees in her someone audiences want to know, hang out with
Natasha Lyonne is laying her (credit) cards on the table, along with her Nicorette and Tea Tree Therapy mint toothpicks. She’s sitting in the Los Angeles office she shares with producing partner Maya Rudolph, and this emptying of pockets came as a response to talk of her moving, part time at least, to the city.
Lyonne likes to free-associate. Thoughts tumble forth, heavy on references to ’70s movies, Elliott Gould, Bob Fosse, John Cassavetes and possibly becoming a cyborg one day. That she quit smoking for the first time a few weeks ago isn’t necessarily helping her focus, she notes.
“It’s confusing, you know what I mean?” Lyonne says, comparing giving up nicotine to kicking heroin many years ago. “It seems like the stakes are much lower and yet arguably for your health, they might be even higher now.
“I should become an addiction specialist,” she continues. “I think I am. Like when you’re a junkie, you’re kicking dope all the time, so it’s an ongoing nightmare. Like, I strongly don’t recommend heroin. There’s one takeaway you can get from this conversation. And quitting cigarettes is weird as hell. But it seemed like a good window to try. On set, I behave like a young Bob Fosse. And when I say ‘young,’ I mean ‘middle-aged,’ I mean ‘almost dead’ Bob Fosse.” She pauses. “Listen, I could start up again at any time. But I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to still be making ‘Poker Face’ when I’m old and just sort of shuffling around, you
know? So why not try?”
Who doesn’t want to see Lyonne making “Poker Face” well into her golden years? Every generation needs its version of Peter Falk’s Lt. Columbo, and Lyonne staked an early claim to that title with the first season of her terrific mystery-thriller series, which debuted earlier this year on Peacock. Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a woman possessing a superpower — she always knows when people are lying. Circumstances force her to move from town to town where she uses her intuition to solve crimes. Each self-contained episode delivers a new homicide, along with guest stars — the likes of Nick Nolte, Chloe Sevigny, Hong Chau and Joseph Gordon-Levitt among them.
Rian Johnson, no stranger to mysteries with his “Knives Out” movies, created “Poker Face” as a
showcase for Lyonne. The two met through Johnson’s wife, film historian Karina Longworth. Lyonne loves Longworth’s “You Must Remember This” podcast and, years ago, wanted to adapt the episode focused on Lena Horne and Paul Robeson and the Hollywood blacklist into a project. It never got off the ground, but the friendship endured, leading to her connection with Johnson. He had been toying with the idea of a case-ofthe-week TV show, and in Lyonne, he believed he had an actor that audiences would love to hang with on a weekly basis.
“You need to find somebody who genuinely has that spark of charisma on screen, and that’s a rare coin,” Johnson says in an interview, mentioning Falk and James Garner in “The Rockford Files.” “When I saw Natasha in (the Netflix series) ‘Russian Doll,’ it
clicked for me. That effortless charisma just comes across on the screen.”
Johnson says he could only watch and marvel when Lyonne directed and starred in the standout “Poker Face” episode “The Orpheus Syndrome,” a macabre slice of horror that doubled as a love letter to Oscar-winning VFX artist Phil Tippett and also featured Lyonne running around in a horse costume. Sometimes when actors direct themselves, they’ll lament the multitasking and perhaps scale back their screen time. Lyonne, Johnson says, embraced the overload because “her brain needs that.”
“She’s into puzzles and word games, and she’ll do, like, eight of them at once,” Johnson says. “She has an endless capacity to keep multiple plates spinning. Not even capacity. It’s a need. I heard David Mamet say this, that writers write
for the same reason beavers cut wood — to stop their teeth from aching. That’s Natasha and life.”
Right now, Lyonne says she’s writing a few TV shows, writing some movies with friends, reworking a movie script she finished some time ago and writing a book. Lyonne just turned 44 and explains that she’s dealing with a midlife crisis by embracing a few new hobbies. She has taken up surfing, for one. Pressed for other pastimes, Lyonne laughs.
“That’s really it. I’m a surfer. I’m a writer. I don’t leave the house. I play the Spelling Bee, the crossword, the Wordle. I read books. I swim laps in my pool. You get the idea. I had a good run. And I’m grateful to go out on a high note.” She starts to laugh. “This isn’t me retiring. But I just feel like I’ve left my young life, and this is my entree into midlife. I feel like I did well by my youth. I didn’t have any moves left. There were no stones left unturned in my youth.”
Lyonne is now hoping to enter what she calls her “Penny Marshall, Sydney Pollack phase,” meaning she’d mostly direct and write (as she did, as well as star, on “Russian Doll”) and answer the phone when someone like Johnson calls asking her to act. (Yes, a second season of “Poker Face” is in the works.) She’s not sure how long she’ll stay in Los Angeles, saying that she’s “sort of trying on T-shirts and seeing what it feels like to have the sun shine on you.”
Lyonne emphasizes that life here still feels transitory. Outside of a bed and some kettlebell weights, a giant “Columbo” poster (a gift from Johnson) is the only substantial piece in her house.
“I’m LA the way that Elliott Gould and Albert Brooks in the ’70s were LA,” Lyonne says. She recalls another lifetime when she was a teenager sitting in the back row at an LA movie theater, drinking a 40 in a brown bag and watching Cassavetes movies.
“Life, this whole set-up, is so absurdist,” Lyonne says. “It’s just so weird that it was so circuitous to get here. In a strange way, I can see now from a bird’s-eye view that I needed all that life experience to actually have something to say on the other side of it.
“That’s why I love playing Charlie,” she continues, circling back to her “Poker Face” role. “She makes a home for herself wherever she goes. I will forever identify with the experience of the outsider and wanting to make all the orphans feel safe together. I love that she’s fighting for the little guy existing on society’s fringes. I so relate to that. It makes me happy to put that energy out there.”