‘Poker Face’ Showrunner on Creating Natasha Lyonne’s Character, Charlie Cale

In ELLE.com’s recurring feature Character Study, we ask the creators behind our favorite shows to go deep about what went into creating their memorable characters: the original idea behind them, how they were tailored to the actor, and elements of them we might not see on the screen. Poker Face’s Charlie Cale has an unusual tool for solving crimes. She also has an unusual—for our times, at least—deficit. The 2023 detective has human lie detecting abilities, but no cell phone. After Charlie learned a bit too much about her criminal Las Vegas employers, she hits the road, sans anything that can track her.
In Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie, the Rian Johnson-created Peacock crime series has created a gum shoe for the ages. Her skill at knowing when someone isn’t telling the truth helps her sniff out crimes, but her savvy, human intelligence, and compassion are what solves them.
“She doesn’t have her head in her phone which, frankly, I am guilty of and I’m sure we all are guilty of,” says Nora Zuckerberg, who show runs Poker Face’s with her sister, Lilla. “She has to look up, she has to look around her, she has to connect with people just to stay sane and entertained and engaged.” The small towns she seeks refuge in have an alarming murder rate, with Charlie stumbling on one every week. The throwback formula, Lyonne’s presence, and a slate of guest stars that includes Judith Light, Chloë Sevigny, Lil Rel Howry, and Hong Chau, make for a seemingly traditional show spun around a few revolutions and executed perfectly.
Nora Zuckerberg spoke to ELLE.com about the essence of Charlie, the past she’s envisioned for her, and excising Lyonne’s gaming New Yorkisms. Lyonne, as Charlie, with Dascha Polanco Peacock How did the character of Charlie Cale come to be?
I have to give Rian credit for coming up with Charlie, who was really something he conceived for Natasha. They had a friendship, they knew that they wanted to work together, and he had a real love for this kind of storytelling. Obviously, it’s the perfect mind meld of Rian’s sensibility and Natasha’s performance. It really became such a special and, I think, almost iconic character. It’s so rare that you have an opportunity to write for a character that really is so completely her own person. She’s not a mom, she’s not a lawyer, she doesn’t have a dead fiancé. She’s just purely Charlie. What do you envision Charlie’s life being like prior to the show? What were her formative experiences? [The writers] talked about, obviously, her ability to tell when people are lying. Is this something she developed over time or is this something she always had. Is this an innate ability? There is a real thing in psychology where some people can pick up on micro expressions more than other people. I think Charlie is that on steroids, but is it something she’s always had or is it a muscle she’s developed over time? A lot of us spend most of our life, even if we know somebody is lying to us, wanting to believe it. It could be pretty tough to have this Charlie-like ability as an adolescent, for example. I mean, oh my god. Trauma. You look at Charlie and she’s a character that is so full of light and hope for humanity. It’s almost like somebody who has gone to maybe a dark place but then come back and seen the good parts, seen the moments where people aren’t lying to each other, where she knows it’s probably true. Maybe those are the moments that she holds onto.
I think the interesting thing with Charlie is that she doesn’t dwell in the darkness. [Later in the season,] Charlie will go to a darker place but she’s always clawing her way back towards the light. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to write that for a character. It gives you a lot of hope in humanity, especially with the years we’ve all had recently. It really felt like therapy sometimes. Lyonne with John Ratzenberger. Peacock It so great to see a character without a phone and it’s nice that it makes sense for the character plot wise. It allows her to connect in a whole different way.
From a storytelling perspective, it’s been wonderful because it really forces you to have Charlie think outside the Google machine. She can’t just Google the answer, she can’t just go on somebody’s social media. There are a few moments in the series where she grabs somebody else’s phone or is able to use a computer, but really most of her detecting is low-fi, which has been really fun to explore. How much does her lie-detecting ability shape her personality? What would she be like without it? We’ve talked and talked in the writers’ room about how she would go about solving a case where she couldn’t tell someone if was lying. Someone who might be a sociopath who so completely believes the lie that they’re telling that it invalidates her ability. We may do that in the future on the show, but I still think Charlie would have that sense of justice, I still think she would have that observant quality, the ability to connect. I think Poker Face is such a unique show and Charlie’s ability is so unique that if you were to take it away, I still think you would have a pretty great show with a detective at its heart. Was Natasha’s accent something you incorporated into her character or used to hint at her past?
Natasha’s always going to be Natasha and her voice is going to shine through. You can’t take the Natasha out of Charlie in many ways. But if we talked about Charlie versus Nadia, Natasha’s character in Russian Doll, Nadia’s very much a city kid and Charlie is much more somebody who grew up in open spaces, a little bit more country. Sometimes there were little New Yorkisms in the scripts that we found ourselves cutting out because it didn’t feel Charlie, it felt a little bit more Natasha or Nadia. In some ways, I’d love to see Charlie and Nadia have an existential conversation.
How did you establish what her style should be?
Casey Fields, our costume designer, did an amazing job of building Charlie’s wardrobe. In the first episode, she has a home base, she has her own style. Then she goes on the road and her wardrobe really became a mix and match of stuff she had with her and stuff she’s picked up along the way. Then she has a few nice pieces like a leather jacket, with the idea that when Charlie did have money she picked up a few special items that she’d mix in with like a vintage t-shirt. Peacock What do you think Charlie’s most significant qualities are? On a surface level you could say the most important or interesting thing about Charlie is her ability to tell if somebody’s lying. [But] really, I think one of the most important things about Charlie is her sense of justice and right and wrong. There’s a wonderful moment in the pilot episode where Dasha’s character says, “In a different time you’d be a knight. Lady Galahad.” There’s this sense that Charlie has an innate feeling for what is just and what is right.
A wonderful arc that Charlie has in the pilot is that she goes from tweeting in the car, “Time’s up on that shit.” That’s the way she fights injustice [but by the episode’s] end she’s really standing up for her friend and putting her life on the line to stop an injustice from happening. There’s something that’s so compelling about that. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Elle Elle Lettermark logo Editor
Adrienne Gaffney is an editor at ELLE who previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.