Poker Face features a cast of folks that’ll please your parents-hell, even your grandparents may be impressed. We’re going for casting that’s gonna give you the tingles.” I directed that episode and got to be on set with John Ratzenberger. “In Episode 2, we got John Ratzenberger to come. Again, that’s the notion of: Who would it be delightful to have show up?” Johnson says. “That was something that, from the very start, was a bull’s eye that we put up for ourselves. While rewatching, Johnson loved getting to see a new star every week-John Cassavetes! Gena Rowlands! Dick Van Dyke! Johnny Cash!-so he baked that concept into the blueprint of his new show. The series pulls heavily from Columbo, Peter Falk’s similar howcatchem series that debuted in the late 1960s. That was the pitch to guest stars like Ron Perlman, Adrien Brody, and Rhea Perlman: “real parts in something fun.” And Poker Face is really, really fun. When you’re a star in Hollywood and the name “Rian Johnson” appears on your phone screen, you pick up. There were nearly a dozen cameos in his most recent film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, including posthumous appearances from Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim. He’s got a particular talent in getting whomever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever he’s working on. Your phone will ring.”Įven though I love my job, I’d pick up the call from Johnson. “Literally all of them! We’ll be out of actors. “The hope is that we can keep going with this, and eventually use every single actor in the world,” Johnson says over Zoom, throwing his hand in the air to beckon us all into the show. So, once he’s gone through this year’s batch of Oscar contenders (he’s already got Stephanie Hsu) and every other actor out there, he’s going to cast little old me. Not because I’m a particularly deft actor-I’m not-but because there aren’t enough Hollywood stars left to cast in his show.

Rian Johnson has cast me in Poker Face, just two minutes into our conversation.

Poker face tv show cast