Poker Face Director Breaks Down Charlie's New Love - and Loss - in Season 2 (EXCLUSIVE)
Director Adam Arkin walks us through Poker Face's romantic ode to heist thrillers.
If you’re a cinephile, lover of Michael Mann’s Heat, or just a romantic, Poker Face Season 2, Episode 7, “One Last Job,” is ticking a lot of boxes.
Written by Taofik Kolade and directed by Adam Arkin (Fargo), this ode to rom coms and heist dramas has Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) taking a break from her nomadic ways to take a gig as a delivery driver for Jenny's (Geraldine Viswanathan) local Indian restaurant. Quickly, Charlie picks up a regular in box store manager, Bill (Corey Hawkins). The pair have some palpable chemistry and, being a free spirit, Charlie is not put off by the fact that Bill, still healing from a breakup, is secretly residing in his retail store to get back on his feet.
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Too bad their good vibes are ruined when the store is robbed by a local thief and Bill’s best friend, Kendall (Sam Richardson), resulting in a cinematic invasion and violent encounter ripped straight from some of the greatest heist/thrillers.
The man who deftly wove together all of the episode’s different tones is Arkin who spoke to NBC Insider about getting to work with actors he loves on an homage to one of his favorite thrillers and showing a softer side to Charlie Cale.
Arkin goes full Heat with “One Last Job”
As constructed, “One Last Job” is essentially two stories in one: a love letter to great cinematic heist thrillers like Michael Mann’s Heat and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, and an ultimately tragic “meet cute” that could have been a burgeoning romance for Charlie and Bill.
Arkin tells NBC Insider that as soon as he cracked open the script, he knew it would be a "gold mine” for him to direct because of the multiple levels of story.
"I like to think of myself as a film buff,” he shared. "I certainly love, and I feel like my my desire to be in this business, was informed by my love of being around films and watching films being made. This definitely had components in it that felt like a nod to all of my own background."
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While Arkin’s episodes air back to back this season, he explained that they shot separately and each were extremely unique in tone and vibe. "I felt between 'Sloppy Joseph' and and 'One Last Job,' that both of them were breaking the mold a little bit,” he said. “With 'Sloppy Joseph,' in the choice of nemesis and the fact that it was the kid's world we were exploring. And in 'One Last Job,' it was the the colors and layers to Natasha's emotional life to Charlie's emotional life that we got to see, which felt different from any episode I had seen prior to this."
Through Kendall’s amateur screenwriting and obsession with cinematic masterpieces, Arkin and the team also got to stitch out their own heist story around the misguided robbery, using montages to explain how the job would be done and then framing how it goes down inside the retail store in the style of classic thrillers.
"As it turns out, I'm a massive fan of the movie, Heat," Arkin said. "It's a film I return to watching, if only for specific sequences in it. I still feel like, even after all these years, it's state of the art in terms of how those kinds of sequences are approached."
Arkin said he went back to the film to help block out "One Last Job,” amongst others. “The heist sequence which was a lot of fun. The Ocean's 11, fast pace of the heist montage was fun. Also, the death of Juice [James Ransone] and figuring that out, like how that's going to happen in a way that would be quirky and odd but still be believable."
Arkin gets romantic with Charlie and Bill
While Arkin has a long acting resume himself, he said was thrilled to work with this episode’s guest stars, Sam Richardson and Corey Hawkins, for the first time.
"I was a huge fan of both,” he said. "I felt the minute Corey showed up, there is just such an incredible charm and charisma to him and an ease to him."
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Arkin loved capturing the chemistry of Natasha and Corey, creating a romantic bubble around the two as they met in the parking lot, flirted, and then had a first date inside the big box store he manages.
"It felt, and correctly so, that the chemistry between him and Natasha was going to really click,” he observed of the shoot. "She seemed really charmed by him from the minute she started working with him. There was very little I had to do, except stay out of the way and make sure we filmed it correctly because there was a spark between the two of them and I think that's really palpable in the episode. I really loved the date that they have in the empty store."
New episodes of Poker Face debut Thursdays on Peacock; head there now to catch “Sloppy Joseph" and the rest of the show's already aired Season 1 and 2 episodes!
