‘Poker Face' Returns With New Mysteries and Old Friends

New York Times

08-05-2025

Natasha Lyonne has been acting since childhood, but she is not a 'nepo baby.' (She wanted to be one, she joked, but 'they're telling me it's too late, and that's unfortunate.') What she does have in lieu of famous parents, however, is a universe of famous friends ready to heed her call.
'I don't have parents or kids,' she said. 'I'm just always trying to create some sort of an old-fashioned caravan on-the-road family band that is a real town-to-town pickup sport where we get to reunite.'
That much is evident in the second season of the Peacock mystery series 'Poker Face,' debuting on Thursday. The show stars Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a reluctant crime solver who can tell when someone is lying. The mystery-of-the-week structure allows Lyonne, who is also an executive producer, to call on her closest pals to guest star as victims or suspects. The upshot is that viewers are treated to mini reunions from the stars of cult classics like 'Slums of Beverly Hills' (1998) and 'But I'm a Cheerleader' (2000).
One episode features Lyonne's 'Slums' love interest, Kevin Corrigan, as a Teamster on a film set that turns into a crime scene. Another has her character's brother from 'Slums,' David Krumholtz, as a kind father to a boy accused of killing a pet gerbil.
Later, her 'Cheerleader' co-star Melanie Lynskey plays an unsuspecting do-gooder roped into a scheme at a hotel bar. Clea DuVall, Lyonne's girlfriend from that same comedy, directs an episode that also stars Lynskey's husband, Jason Ritter; DuVall also played Charlie's sister in the first season. In real life, Lyonne and Lynskey planned DuVall's wedding reception.
These are some of Lyonne's favorite people, she said.
'I ended up an old man and a workaholic, so the only place I see them is on the road from gig to gig,' she added.
Rian Johnson, the 'Poker Face' creator, said the show's casting process is somewhat chaotic, with new crime stories each episode that require new actors to bring them to life. Often the ability to text friends is a convenient means to an end; the nostalgia factor is incidental.
'It's not so much a conceptual 'Let's do this reunion or that reunion,'' he said. 'It's just that people love Natasha, and people who are in her life stay in her life.'
Because Charlie moves from town to town in 'Poker Face' and guest stars appear only briefly as the kooky people she encounters, Lyonne said, she and Johnson tried to slot actors into roles that aren't necessarily their usual milieus. (Lynskey, for one, was happy she got to play a semi-normal woman given her recent feral turn in 'Yellowjackets.')
'All these rock star giants can probably do practically anything if given a chance,' Lyonne said. 'They don't have to sustain it for seven seasons or even an hour and a half.'
The show also features other friends Lyonne has amassed over her career. Her 'Orange Is the New Black' co-star Adrienne C. Moore appears in one installment; Becky Chin, an assistant director of 'Poker Face,' worked on 'Orange' and on Lyonne's Netflix series 'Russian Doll.'
But for the actors who met Lyonne back in the '90s, there's a forged-in-fire quality to their partnerships. Lynskey said that during the making of the director Jamie Babbit's pink-saturated satire 'But I'm a Cheerleader,' in which Lyonne plays a girl sent to a gay conversion camp, she, Lyonne and DuVall were in a 'crazy place' emotionally. (DuVall in an interview described the three of them as ''90s scumbags who were bopping around.') Babbit wrangled them for a film that is now regarded as a queer touchstone.
'None of us were really content or happy,' Lynskey said. 'For us to be adults in our mid-40s who survived and are working and able to make choices about what we want to do and who we want to do it with, it feels very, very powerful to us to have come from this place of desperation for a long time.'
These days, saying yes when Lyonne calls is a no-brainer, said Corrigan, who also starred with Lyonne and Lynskey in 'Detroit Rock City' (1999), a '70s period piece about a bunch of kids who want to attend a KISS concert.
'She left me a message after I had gotten the offer to be in 'Poker Face,' saying, 'Hi, Corrigan, so, I'll have the usual,'' he said. 'It was like, 'Yeah, I'll be there to serve it up.'
Lyonne also directed and co-wrote Corrigan's episode, about a movie shoot at a funeral home gone wrong. He said it was like 'witnessing the arrival of all that potential' he first saw in 'Slums,' Tamara Jenkins's coming-of-age story about a Jewish family in Los Angeles struggling to make ends meet.
'To be clear, I was madly in love with Kevin Corrigan,' Lyonne said. 'I mean, it was 1998, we all were. We still are.'
In 'Slums,' Krumholtz played the annoying older brother of Lyonne's character. The shoot was intense, and he still thinks of her as family. 'She is sort of the closest thing to my biological Hollywood sister,' Krumholtz said.
His 'Poker Face' turn was also a homecoming in another way: It was directed by Adam Arkin, an executive producer of the series, who is the son of Alan Arkin, who played the father in 'Slums.'
'It wasn't lost on me that fans would watch this episode and recognize the reunion and then in a nostalgic way romanticize 'Slums of Beverly Hills,'' Krumholtz said. 'And it's a movie that should be romanticized.'
Even for people on set who aren't technically part of the reunions, it can be heartwarming to watch them happen.
'The rotating cast of this show means it is a little bit like an episode of 'This Is Your Life,'' Johnson said. 'I definitely feel emotions when I see, like, Clea and Natasha working on set together.'
Lyonne is just happy to be in a place where she can call on her buddies and give them a fun gig and credit in the process.
'I'm so grateful to be the guy who knocks,' she said. 'As a self-made teenager doing the family taxes at 12 years old, maybe it's capitalism that grinds into us this concept of competition instead of collaboration. We think it's each man for himself and, like, that's America, that's showbiz, kid. But it's actually not, is it?'