Natasha Lyonne and director Rian Johnson reveal ‘magic trick’ behind Cynthia Erivo playing quintuplets in ‘Poker Face’ Season 2 premiere

The cast and crew of Peacock's Emmy-winning comedy Poker Face were laughing it up during a special PaleyFest premiere of Season 2 at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre on March 29. Lucky fans were shown the first episode, titled "The Game is a Foot," featuring Wicked star Cynthia Erivo as a set of troubled quintuplets. Reviews are under strict embargo for now — the episode premieres May 8 on Peacock — but we can report there were plenty of laughs, gasps, and rapturous applause from the audience in attendance.

After the screening, Emmy nominee Aidy Bryant (Saturday Night Live, Shrill) hosted a fun Q&A panel featuring star, EP, director, and writer Natasha Lyonne, creator, writer, director, and EP Rian Johnson, director Clea DuVall, Season 1 guest star Judith Light (who won Peacock's first Emmy for her performance in 2023), and Season 2 guest stars GaTa, Haley Joel Osment, John Cho, Kumail Nanjiani, and Melanie Lynskey.

Although Erivo wasn't in attendance, Bryant called out the Oscar nominee's "amazing" performance before introducing the all-star panel who will be featured throughout the rest of the season. They broke the ice with a quick round of "What's your favorite holiday?" (Thanksgiving edged out Christmas) before getting into all the juicy details about the upcoming season.

"I wanted to do what we did in Season 1, just more of it," Johnson said. "The idea was not to see where Charlie (Lyonne) goes with some bigger arc — the idea was, 'Let's make some kick-ass, wonderful episodes.'" He revealed they shot the complicated Season 2 premiere in just 10 days, "which is a very fast schedule for the amount of script it was."

Johnson, who directed the first episode, said there wasn't any "crazy camera technology" used to film Erivo's five characters (up to four appeared together in some scenes). "We would literally leave the camera, Cynthia would do half of her scene, she would go and change, and come back and do the other half. She somehow kept it all in her head and was the loveliest person in the world."

Lyonne said Johnson was being humble. "I've never seen Rian so in his element," she shared. "'The Game is a Foot' episode is possibly the most Rian Johnson episode to ever Rian Johnson. It took like 87 screens within screens to figure out how the whole magic trick would work. It was a delight to behold."

Photo courtesy of Peacock

Johnson returned the love-fest, saying, "There's no recurring cast [in this show] except for Natasha. That means you get to have wonderful people coming in every episode, but it also means that to sustain that over the course of what it takes to shoot a TV season, and to be out there working every single week with a different cast, it's an incredible effort. The fact that she makes it look so effortless on screen, and creates a character that you want to travel across the United States with, is a massive [accomplishment]."

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Erivo said, “I knew that my head would be split into many different spaces, but I was like, ‘Well, if not now, then when?’ I’m always open to trying things that I haven’t done before, and I wanted to do this. I wanted to figure out what it would be like to compartmentalize and play different characters all at once, to challenge myself to see if it was possible...I’d play one side, and I’d have a lovely stand-in doing the other side. I would still have to remember what I did on one side so that my reaction would match the other way, so that it would make sense when speaking to each other.”

Other secrets spilled during the 36-minute gabfest included Nanjiani's upcoming performance as "Gator Joe." The actor recounted, "I got a text from Natasha and I said, 'Yea, sure.' The next text was the script. It was this [guy] in the Florida panhandle with tattoos and frosted hair. I texted back, 'Did you send this one to me by mistake?' Then, I immediately called my dialect coach and said, 'I have six days. I want to try and learn a Florida panhandle accent. Can we try and see if we can do it and, if we can't, I'll just speak like a Pakistani guy who has been in America for 20 years. As soon as we started working on it, it was just too fun and too exciting to not fully commit to it."

In what Lyonne describes as a "bonanza" episode based on David Mamet's 1987 film House of Games, Cho plays a "villainous swindler" opposite Lynskey. "It was a lot of dialogue," Lynskey recalls. "We had two days of talking, which is more fun than it sounds." Cho interjected, "It was such a treat to watch [Melanie] unpack it, dissect it, break it down into blocks, and meticulously attack each moment. It was one of the great thrills of my life."

In another upcoming episode, Osment plays a social media influencer who is sponsoring his wedding with an energy drink. "It was a tough conversation with my fiancé," he laughed. "That energy drink is called 'Ball-Zilla.'"

Closing out the event, Bryant joked that the number of guest stars on Season 2 of Poker Face would take her "four hours to list." Still, she wanted to know if there was a "wish list" of actors that Johnson and Lyonne could "level up with" next year. When Lyonne responded, "Aidy Bryant," the moderator quickly responded, "Finally we've gotten to where I wanted to start. I'm hurtin' bad for cash. I'm not being paid for this — they said I could take home some cookies."

Poker Face is a mystery-of-the-week series following Lyonne’s Charlie, who has an extraordinary ability to determine when someone is lying. This season, Charlie continues her cross-country odyssey, encountering a new cast of characters and investigating crimes along the way.

Season 2 of Poker Face premieres May 8, 2025 with three episodes, followed by a new episode streaming every Thursday.

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