Rian Johnson has revealed the relatively low-tech way he was able to have Cynthia Erivo play multiple different characters in the opening episode of the new season of detective series Poker Face.
Wicked star Erivo, 38, appears in “The Game is a Foot” playing five identical siblings.
Speaking at the PayleyFest television festival in Los Angeles following a screening of the episode, Knives Out director Johnson, 51, said no CGI was used to achieve the effect.
“We had a 10-day schedule to shoot that, which is a very fast schedule for the amount of script it was,” he explained.
He continued: “It’s not like we were using high, crazy camera technology. It was literally leaving the camera there, Cynthia would do half of her scene, she would go and change and she somehow kept it all in her head and was the loveliest person in the world.”
The new season premieres on Peacock in the US on May 8, before arriving in the UK on Sky and NOW on May 9.
Poker Face season two sees Natasha Lyonne return as Charlie Cale, a human lie detector on the run across America who ends up investigating a new murder every episode.
The season will feature a star-studded roster of guest appearances from the likes of Melanie Lynskey, John Mulaney, Giancarlo Esposito, John Cho, Haley Joel Osment and Kumail Nanjiani.
Speaking at the same event, Nanjiani revealed he’ll be playing a Florida cop known as Gator Joe and learned a Panhandle accent for the role. “As soon as I started working on it, it was just too fun and too exciting to not fully commit to it,” he said.
“[My episode is] set over a few years with a baby alligator who grows up to a full size alligator over the course of the episode. So I got to work with the best in the biz, like these folks who are absolutely amazing, and also these giant alligator animatronics.”
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The first season of Poker Face was widely acclaimed. In a four-star review for The Independent, television critic Nick Hilton wrote: “In a way, Poker Face represents the perfect synthesis of Lyonne’s chronology-busting masterpiece, Russian Doll, and the newly established appetite for murder mysteries conducted with the marching band rhythm of the Coen Brothers or Edgar Wright.
“The plots might wrap themselves up a little too conveniently at times… but the anarchic spirit of Poker Face carries it through.”
