Rian Johnson Reveals Poker Face Guest Stars, Season 2 Secrets at PaleyFest (DETAILS)
Get a taste of what's to come in Season 2 of Peacock's mystery-of-the-week series, premiering May 2.
Season 2 of Poker Face is shaping up to be a fun one.
Star Natasha Lyonne and creator Rian Johnson (Knives Out) revealed exciting new details about what's to come in the Peacock limited series during the recent PaleyFest LA 2025 panel for the series. They were joined by Season 1 guest stars Clea DuVall and Judith Light, as well as Kumail Nanjiani, John Cho, Melanie Lynskey, GaTa, and Haley Joel Osment, all of whom are set to appear in Season 2.
As a refresher, Poker Face centers on Lyonne's Charlie Cale, an eclectic whizz at people reading. She's got a special gift of knowing exactly when someone is lying to her face, and she can't help when she spontaneously blurts, "Bulls--t!" to the liar of the moment. But after getting in trouble with the mob, Cale is forced to go on the run, meeting plenty of friends and new enemies in the process.
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The cast of characters Charlie encounters are played by a lot of Johnson and Lyonne's colleagues and personal friends.
"[Casting] does inevitably end up being a mixture of friends that we worked with before. But also, people we always respected that we haven't gotten the chance to work with," Johnson said during the panel, which was attended by NBC Insider. "And I'll say, just for all these guys to jump into something where you're really carrying the entire episode as a guest star, and you're being thrown into this crazy world, and it's just two weeks of shooting — it's a high degree of difficulty to land that. And yet every single one of our guest stars show up ready to play."
Clea DuVall is back as a director for Poker Face Season 2
Clea DuVall has been one of Lyonne's best friends since they starred together with Lynskey in But I'm a Cheerleader (1999). So naturally, Lyonne had to recruit DuVall to play Cale's estranged sister Emily in Season 1. And this season, DuVall is behind the camera to direct a special episode starring Lynskey's real-life husband, Jason Ritter, and rapper/actor Method Man.
Lyonne said of her bestie, "Clea is a f--king rock star! Any of us autodidacts that actually came by it honestly, like to see [her] precision and the meticulousness and organization. It was just so much fun to get to watch. And Clea does direct Method Man, and I didn't even know that was a bucket list item."
DuVall added, "He was incredible. And I did text him when we were done, but he never texted me back."
Kumail Nanjiani plays against type as Poker Face's Gator Joe
Nanjiani told the crowd that he was a last-minute cast as Florida Man, Gator Joe for his episode directed by Lucky McKee.
"I got a text from Natasha, and I said, 'Yeah, sure,'" Nanjiani recalled. "The next text was the script, and it was this cop in the Florida Panhandle with tattoos and frosted hair and his name was Gator Joe, and his best friend is an alligator. I said, 'Back up, did you send this one by mistake?'"
Nanjiani said he immediately called his dialect coach, Liz Himelstein, to help him prep. "I was like, 'Hey, 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's been in America for 20-years,'" he joked. "And as soon as we started working on it, it was just too fun and too exciting to not fully commit to it."
To get into character, Nanjiani also watched hours upon hours of aquatic films to gain a better understanding of the genre.
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Nanjiani said he was also thrilled to work with McKee, a respected horror film director. "Working with him was absolutely wonderful. We became very close friends," Nanjiani shared.
Johnson also revealed that director John Sayles makes a cameo as the Chief of Police, a fitting role for the director of the cult classic film Alligator.
Cynthia Erivo, John Cho, and Haley Joel Osment's roles revealed
During the Poker Face panel, snippets of information came out about other episodes too. As previously reported, Cynthia Erivo kicks off the season with the episode "The Game Is a Foot," which is directed by Johnson. In the premiere, Erivo plays multiple siblings, with several of them appearing onscreen at the same time.
In another episode, Mimi Cave (Fresh) directs Lynskey and Cho as strangers who meet for a date in a dialogue-heavy episode that Lyonne compared to a David Mamet play.
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As for Osment's role, the fellow former child actor who came up in the business with Lyonne plays a husband-to-be that gets his wedding sponsored by an energy drink with unexpected results.
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!
