It’s a wonderful thing to aspire to – to create characters that last,” says Rian Johnson, the genial American filmmaker who may well have created a couple of his own. He’s talking, here, about Charlie Cale, Natasha Lyonne’s louche, lie-detecting sleuth-on-the-road at the centre of one of the year’s best TV series, Poker Face. But he could just as easily be talking about Benoit Blanc, the drawling Poirot-ish detective played by Daniel Craig in Knives Out and its sequels. Or indeed some of the other totemic characters Johnson has temporarily stewarded down the years: Breaking Bad’s Walter White; Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s Luke Skywalker. Among the rogue’s gallery of Johnson’s oeuvre, Charlie Cale is in some pretty flash company.
“Natasha really is the show,” says Johnson, smiling guardedly down the webcam from his home in Los Angeles. “It goes beyond acting skill, beyond charisma: to be able to project that on screen and feel alive in a way that people genuinely want to see every week.” The 51-year-old writer and director is speaking to me a few days after the second season premiere of Poker Face – and several months before the release of his starry new Knives Out sequel, Wake Up Dead Man. It’s reasonable to describe Johnson as one of biggest contemporary directors in the world, when it comes to name recognition – thanks, in part, to the maelstrom of backlash that accompanied his brilliant but polarising Star Wars movie in 2017. It’s bewildering to think of the vitriol that once seemed magnetised to the mild-mannered and enthusiastic man conversing with me today.
Poker Face, released on Sky and Now TV in the UK, is a largely unserialised detective romp in the vein of Columbo – not a whodunnit but a “howcatchem”. Lyonne’s Charlie is a sort of gregarious oddball, blessed with the supernatural ability to tell whenever anyone is lying. She blows like tumbleweed, through sheer Zelig-like happenstance, from crime scene to crime scene – whether that’s a domestic murder in a family-run funeral home, or a homicidal cheating ring at a minor league baseball team. When Johnson first decided to make it, he “realised very quickly that what actually drives a show like Columbo is Peter Falk… you’re coming back every week because you want to hang out with that character. And that’s a very rare thing to find.” Lyonne has simply got it.
There’s something joyously atavistic about Poker Face, a deceptively sincere throwback to bygone murder-of-the-week TV series. It’s a mode of television that’s become deeply unfashionable now, in our age of serialised “prestige” homogeneity and streaming-binge optimisation – but it’s one that, as Poker Face proves, still has a lot of juice left. “Growing up, this is what I watched week to week,” says Johnson, “and it’s also what television was, for the majority of its existence.” Was there, I ask, a concern that audiences had, in some way, forgotten how to watch shows like this? “Yeah – a big fear,” says Johnson. “It confused people.
“When we were first out there pitching it, we would get asked, ‘Wait a minute, why is your audience going to keep watching this?’ And my response was always like, ‘Well, why did people watch television before? Before The Sopranos transformed what TV was. This is a format that worked for so many years, and it’s a pretty powerful thing.’”
There’s a strange kind of contradiction to Poker Face. On the one hand, it is deeply cinematic – visually, it looks better than most Hollywood movies, and every episode features multiple high-profile guest stars. (Among this season’s list: Cynthia Erivo playing identical sextuplets, Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney, Awkwafina and Justin Theroux.) But there’s also a modesty to its scope that’s hard to find in TV these days. “Preciousness is off the table,” Johnson says. “It really is just fight or flight – tell the story as clearly as possible, get it shot as efficiently as possible, and move on. Maybe it’s my indie film roots, but I love the pace of it.”
Johnson did indeed start out in the scrappy world of independent cinema. Born in Maryland and raised in San Clemente, California, by way of Colorado, he honed his craft at film school. His debut feature, Brick (2005), was a dark, mannered crime drama, set in a high school and told in the style of a classic noir. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who would go on to appear in almost all of Johnson’s projects, including Poker Face’s first season), Brick became a legitimate cult classic – its offbeat fusion of teen drama and gumshoe pastiche is quite unlike anything else.
After Brick was a surprise hit – earning nearly nine times the $450,000 it cost to make it – Johnson was handed a bigger budget, and a cast of big-name stars (Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo) for his next project, the offbeat dramedy The Brothers Bloom. After this came Looper, a superlative time-travel thriller starring Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. Amid the critical and commercial success of Looper, Johnson was also enjoying a flourishing reputation as a director of television, having helmed three of Breaking Bad’s most acclaimed episodes, including the devastating late-season reckoning “Ozymandias”.
It was at this point that Disney arrived, poaching Johnson to direct the second in a trilogy of new Star Wars sequels. The resulting film, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, was rapturously received by critics, but proved a lightning rod for toxic fan discourse, with vocal corners of the Star Wars fanbase taking issue with Johnson’s take on the Star Wars mythology. (Chief among the gripes: the decision to reimagine Mark Hamill’s legendary Jedi as a jaded and remorse-addled hermit.)
We learned very quickly in the writer’s room not to try and write Natasha Lyonne-speak into the scripts, because it ends up just feeling like a parody
“I always want to make this clear: it’s not like I’ve gone through a living hell or something,” Johnson says, chipperly. “I’ve had the kind of experience that you only dream about as a filmmaker. I was in my twenties when the prequels came out.” (The George Lucas-directed prequel trilogy, beginning with 1999’s The Phantom Menace, was, and in many quarters still is, reviled by many fans of the franchise.) “I mean, you talk about wars between Star Wars fans… We experienced our own. That [the prequels] was World War I, and this [The Last Jedi] was World War II.”
“But,” he adds, “I feel like I've had such a wonderful, lovely, positive experience with the fans during the course of it. That's left me a bigger Star Wars fan than I ever was, which is really something, because I grew up with it as the bedrock of my childhood.”
After the whiplash of The Last Jedi, Johnson started work on what he hoped would be a sure-fire crowd-pleaser: Knives Out. The film was an ensemble piece starring a glut of famous faces, Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Christopher Plummer and Toni Collette among them. The undisputed standout, though, was Craig’s character, an absurd and memorable eccentric who seemed to stroll right into the pantheon of great screen sleuths. “When I first started writing the Benoit Blanc character, I very much had in my head, ‘Let’s write a really iconic detective’ – and that led nowhere good,” Johnson recalls. “Because I just started writing all these ridiculous quirks. ‘What if he had an eye patch? What if he wears a certain hat all the time?’ And I realised at some point it was just stupid.”
So he “stripped it back”, giving the character just the “hint of an ego”, along with a “slight Southern accent”. (In the final film, the twang is only “slight” in the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger or Foghorn Leghorn can be said to have “slight” accents.) “There are hints of Poirot, but he also has a gentleness — then you get an actor like Daniel Craig in there, and he really finds the nuance,” Johnson says. “It’s the same with Charlie Cale… we learned very quickly in the writer’s room not to try and write Natasha Lyonne-speak into the scripts, because it ends up just feeling like a parody.”
The decision to turn Knives Out into a franchise – bringing back Craig, but plopping him into a new locale, among a fresh cast of larger-than-life suspects – was an organic and inevitable one. When Netflix swooped in to invest $450m in two Knives Out sequels, there was no saying no. The first of these, Glass Onion, came out in 2021 and starred Ed Norton as a tech billionaire with shades of Elon Musk. The second, Wake Up Dead Man, is currently shrouded in mystery; Johnson is, for now, keeping schtum. (He is, he says, pushing for as big of a theatrical release as possible, despite Netflix’s ethos of streaming-centric releases.
The possibilities of the future seem to disappear into the horizon for Johnson – he has earned the sort of creative freedom granted to increasingly fewer filmmakers nowadays. Last year, Warner Bros struck a deal with his production company, T-Street, for two currently unannounced films. Poker Face, like Columbo, has the feel of a series that could run and run. “The pleasure of these old shows is that there are like 800 episodes,” Johnson says. “I mean, for me, I’m at a place in life where it’s like, let’s take this one step at a time.” He smiles coyly. “But let me put it this way: I would keep watching for another 20 years.”
Before we disconnect, I can’t help but ask about another of Johnson’s prospective projects: his own trilogy of Star Wars films. Announced six weeks before The Last Jedi was released, the mooted movies never materialised, and updates have more or less dried up. “What happened? Knives Out!” he replies. “I mean, I kind of went down the murder mystery rabbit hole – I’m focused on making other stuff. But that wouldn’t rule out it happening down the line. If I get back in the Star Wars universe someday, I’d be the happiest person.” I don’t know if Johnson is much of a poker player, but it seems to me as if he means it.
‘Poker Face’ is available to watch in the UK on Sky and Now, with new episodes released every Friday
