IMAGINE TRANSPLANTING THE Dude from The Big Lebowski to Columbo, and you’re somewhere close to Natasha Lyonne’s lead character in Poker Face. The case-of-the-week mystery show — co-written and co-directed by Rian Johnson — sees Lyonne’s Charlie take a road trip across America, cardigan-clad and with a Coors Light never far from hand, solving the crimes that cross her path. “I really love the accidental detective,” Lyonne tells Empire. “You know, the person who stumbles into a life of solving things just because their brain works that way.”
Aside from her obsessive fixation on the news, Charlie’s deal is that she can detect when a person is lying. Johnson cooked up the idea with Lyonne, whom he sought out after watching her straight-talking, mystery-solving turn in Russian Doll. “It presented an interesting obstruction in the writing process: how is it not over in the first five minutes of talking to the person?” he says of Charlie’s talent. It’s a far less messy trait than Ana de Armas’ Marta in Knives Out, who can’t tell a lie without vomiting. But Johnson explains that it’s not as useful a skill as you might think. “[Charlie] gives this monologue in the pilot about how people are constantly lying,” he says. “You have to pay attention to why the person is lying about that specific thing.”