Rian Johnson Teases “Vibe” of Poker Face Season 2 (EXCLUSIVE)

It’s fascinating to track an artist as they fix their attention on a hyper-specific medium or theme, be it Picasso’s “Blue Period,” Seurat’s dots, or, to get more modern about it, Rian Johnson‘s current murder milieu.

Once Johnson wrapped Star Wars: The Last Jedi in 2017, the writer/director set out to make his own bespoke ensemble murder mystery featuring an original investigator. The result was his massively popular Knives Out (2019) film which introduced Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), a Southern gentleman private detective with a keen intellect, into the cinematic mystery genre. 

Then COVID-19 landed, and Johnson’s binge watch of choice was Richard Levinson and William Link’s seminal ’70s “howtocatchem” mystery series Columbo (available on Peacock). It featured the delightfully rumpled Peter Falk as the disarmingly keen homicide detective Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD, and inspired him to create his own modern take on the inverted detective drama, with Natasha Lyonne as his signature detective. 

RELATED: Poker Face Season 2: Everything to Know About Guest Stars, Premiere Date & More

From their creative union, Peacock’s Poker Face was born and immediately became a critical and audience hit. The first season followed the bumpy life of Lyonne’s Charlie Cale, a Vegas cocktail waitress. When she runs afoul of a mob boss she then hightails it across America in her 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. At every stop, Cale meets a friend or foe somehow intertwined with a recent murder, of which she invariably helps solve via her people perceptive “bulls–t-meter.” 

Poker Face returns to Peacock on May 8 for a second season featuring 12 new mysteries, and a seriously deep bench of A-list guest stars to fuel Cale’s next cases. At the recent PaleyFest event for the new season, Johnson circled up with NBC Insider to discuss some changes made to this batch of stories, the mercurial nature of their casting and his favorite episodes this season.

Rian Johnson says Poker Face Season 2 is more standalone than ever

The first season of Poker Face was built to have Charlie have a season-long arc where her fugitive status got increasingly more dangerous until she had to stop and confront her mob boss tormentor in Atlantic City. Cale left that meeting with a target still on her back, but Johnson revealed that they’ve gone more stand-alone with this season. 

“We came into the season not trying to think, how do we further Charlie’s story, or deepen whatever,” Johnson said of their writers’ room. “The basis of the show is the TV shows I grew up watching, like Columbo, Magnum, P.I., and Rockford Files. And the whole heart of that is just surprising the audience with each episode so that’s one thing that we really took a swing at and did.

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“Every episode this season has its own vibe,” he continued. “Every episode has its own genre that it’s playing in, and really its own tone. Some of them are hard comedy, some of them are very much drama. Some of them are darker. Some of them are lighter. When those opening credits come up, just giving the audience something where they don’t know what to expect with every episode, and they’re genuinely delighted and surprised…that was kind of the goal.”

How Poker Face recruited their guest stars

While the first season of the show also featured a mass of talent from Adrian Brody to Nick Nolte, and Stephanie Hsu to Ellen Barkin, Poker Face Season 2 might even more star-studded. Just a partial list includes Giancarlo Esposito, Katie Holmes, Cynthia Erivo, Margo Martindale, John Mulaney and Ego Nwodim.

With names like that, surely casting must take months? Johnson shared the secret that it’s actually very last minute. 

“It’s funny because we cast these week by week. It’s not like at the beginning, we get the whole thing lined up,” he revealed. “There’s a panic’d nature to it, of laying down the railroad track as the train is coming down the line. Every week, it feels like we kind of go through this panic process and blink, and say, ‘Oh, my God. Did we just do this? Is Mulaney actually doing it? I guess he’s showing up!” he laughed. “It felt like that the first season, and felt like they even more so second season.”

Rian Johnson’s Season 2 MVP episodes

While jokingly affronted to be asked to pick any favorites this season, Johnson pointed out the season premiere and his lone directed episode this season, “The Game Is a Foot” starring Erivo. 

RELATED: Cynthia Erivo’s Wild Poker Face Role Revealed — She’s Playing Multiple Characters!?

“For me, there’s an episode that Simon Rex stars in that’s about a minor league baseball team,” he added. “Oh my god, I’m a huge baseball fan. Specifically, the minor league aspect of it, where it’s not the majors. It’s really people who are scrapping and trying. And that very much goes with the vibe of the show. I think it’s a really fun episode.

“And, we also did an episode that’s very much kind of a riff on House of Games,” he said of David Mamet’s 1987 feature directorial debut. “It’s kind of a con man episode. John Cho and Melanie Lynskey are in it, and they’re so good.”

To watch Poker Face’s new Season 2 mysteries, tune into Peacock starting May 2. Meanwhile, catch up on Charlie’s journey by streaming all of Season 1 right here!