News

Jan 28, 2024

‘Poker Face’ Creator Rian Johnson And Star Natasha Lyonne Interview

In a studio overlooking Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Rian Johnson is strapped to a

In a studio overlooking Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, Rian Johnson is strapped to a lie detector machine. Next to him at the controls sits Natasha Lyonne, twiddling the device's knobs with all the sinister intent of a supervillain. This photoshoot tableau is, of course, ripped right from the Meet the Parents Ben Stiller-Robert De Niro interrogation scene. Next, in an homage to the pithiest of TV detective tropes, Lyonne will pose at a typewriter, fake-talking into a rotary-dial phone. The visual nod this time goes to Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

In fact, the late, great Lansbury is connective tissue for Johnson and Lyonne. Lansbury and Lyonne appeared briefly together in Johnson's film, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, on a Zoom call playing the mystery game Among Us with Daniel Craig's Detective Benoit Blanc.

Little did we know back when that film premiered, that Johnson was sitting on an Easter egg with that scene. Only later, when he aired his debut television creation, Poker Face, would the presence of Lyonne in Glass Onion explain itself.

In Poker Face, Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a woman who just knows when a person is lying. Her savant skill allows her to clean up at — you guessed it — poker, and in the process, she makes an enemy of an undesirable casino boss. But in classic "mystery of the week" style, that's just the "‘"B" plot rumbling in the background. As Charlie is forced to throw away her cellphone and go on the run, she cannot help but stumble upon liars at every small-town stop along the way. And where there are liars, there are, coincidentally, many murders for her to solve. From a couple of geriatric terrorists (Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson), to a tortured vegan BBQ chef (Larry Brown), a manipulative monster mastermind (Cherry Jones), and her victim (Nick Nolte) in an episode Lyonne co-wrote and directed, each episode is standalone satisfying and oftentimes hilarious in a way we haven't seen since the likes of Magnum P.I., The A-Team or the original Quantum Leap.

With its Columbo-identical yellow title cards, Poker Face immediately announces its heritage. And with her self-effacing sensibility, Charlie echoes that wrinkly raincoated detective played by Peter Falk. But also, as Lyonne puts it, Charlie is sort of like The Big Lebowski's Dude, approaching her murder-mystery cross-country odyssey with signature swagger and a Coors Light in hand.

Part of the format's appeal for Johnson lies in its revolving door of guest stars, and he recruited an impressive team of talent to fulfill the criteria. Some from his films, like Adrien Brody, with whom he worked on The Brothers Bloom, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt from his films Brick and Looper, Lyonne's close friend and Russian Doll co-star Chloë Sevigny, starring as a dangerously embittered rocker, Dascha Polanco, Lyonne's co-star in Orange is the New Black, Benjamin Bratt, Ellen Barkin, Hong Chau, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephanie Hsu and more.

Casting for the upcoming second season is ongoing, but there's hope we’ll see more famous faces from Johnson's films. As he says, "I’m calling every single one of them. I would love to get Kelly Marie Tran from Star Wars in there for an episode."

When Johnson and Lyonne wrapped what Lyonne calls their "high concept day" shooting the accompanying photos for this piece, they sat down to discuss the fun and games of making Poker Face and its future.

DEADLINE: Rian, why do you think you gravitated to bingeing Columbo during the pandemic?

RIAN JOHNSON: It's funny, I didn't really watch Columbo as a kid. It was a little too mature for me. I was much more into The A-Team and The Incredible Hulk. But I think a lot of people did this over the lockdown. I binged the whole thing, and that's where this whole thing really started. It was comfort food. The thing that really hit me was how much it is, at heart, a hangout show with Peter Falk. I wasn't watching each new episode really for the mystery plot. It was for Falk and the guest star. It was, "It's Oh, Dick Van Dyke, this will be amazing. Oh my God, Johnny Cash and Ida Lupino in this one, this is going to be phenomenal." And the ‘howcatchem’ format allowed them to give screen time to the villain and to have them be built into a substantial character and play out the dynamic between them and Columbo, which is one of the things I love. In a way, these type of shows have more in common with sitcoms than they do with Agatha Christie books, in that you’re coming back every week to get a hit of something familiar, to hang out with a character or characters that you like, and to get something new in the same shape that you’re familiar with every single time.

DEADLINE: What does television mean to you as opposed to your connection to features?

JOHNSON: The same way that when I think about Star Wars, it takes me back to playing with Star Wars toys and seeing the movies and all of those tactile experiences and what that meant to me as a kid. When I think about TV, I think about sitting on the floor in front of my parents’ TV when I was a kid watching reruns during the middle of the day, and the relationship that I formed with those shows and what they meant to me, and how they mythologized in my head, and how they lived there.

There's a very specific range of shows that we talked about, with so many of them shot on the Universal lot and having a slapdash kind of quality to them, even the better ones. There's something incredibly joyful about that for me specifically. And that's what latched in my head: if I’m going to do a TV show, I don't want to do a nine-hour movie. I want to make a TV show, and I want to make something that feels that way to me and hits that pleasure center.

DEADLINE: Where was Poker Face in terms of development when you shot that Glass Onion Zoom scene?

NATASHA LYONNE: The running order is Rian shoots Glass Onion. Then Rian and I are having a lot of meetings and dinners and talking about the possibility of Poker Face. We end up selling it to Peacock while he's in post on Glass Onion, and I’m in post on Russian Doll, I think. Good luck making sense of this. Suffice it to say that he already had a cut of Glass Onion by the time we shot the Angela Lansbury scene. He said, "Do you want to do this thing with me where we shoot this Zoom game during the pandemic with Daniel Craig?" Shooting it together was actually our first time working together, so we were excited about it. And he shot everybody separately because it was Zoom, meaning [Stephen] Sondheim and Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] and Angela [Lansbury] and Daniel [Craig]. Then three months into shooting Poker Face, he was like, "We changed the dialogue for what Daniel is doing, so can I tweak it?" So, we actually reshot it while I was in my Poker Face trailer.

DEADLINE: People had no idea of the subtext at that point.

LYONNE: Yeah. I remember seeing on Twitter after Glass Onion came out, "Why was Natasha there? It doesn't make sense." But of course, Rian and I already knew about Poker Face, so it was just preemptively planting yet another person who's involved in detective business, whether that's Angela Lansbury or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writing all those mystery novels. I was somebody who was busy playing Charlie Cale at work on a daily basis.

DEADLINE: You met through Rian's wife, Karina Longworth because Natasha wanted to option an episode of Karina's podcast You Must Remember This?

JOHNSON: Yeah. We had met through Karina a few times, and then I had this vague idea to do this kind of show in the back of my head. And I was like, "Yeah, but who can be Peter Falk today?" Then I watched Russian Doll and said, "Well, there you go, right there. This is it." And not even like, "Oh, she's acting like Peter Falk." It wasn't that at all, actually. It was finding somebody who had that charismatic draw of you can't take your eyes off of her, and you just want to watch her. The answer to why viewers are going to keep tuning in is exactly that, is because it is to hang out with her. And I felt that watching Russian Doll, and that's so rare. And it's not about how good an actor someone is. It's not about how attractive they are; it's none of that. There is just an X-factor of somebody who you can tell has a soul on the screen that makes you lean forward and want to know more about them. So, I asked her if she wanted to get dinner, and then said, "I’m thinking of doing this type of show." I think she thought it was just one of those bullshit Hollywood things, like, "Yeah, we should work together." I think she was very surprised when I dropped the scripts in her lap six months later.

DEADLINE: Natasha, I remember interviewing you for Russian Doll, and you told me about the movies you watched over and over as a kid, and the male leads you identified with. With Poker Face, you have a protagonist who's a woman, but she inhabits the kind of laid-back, confident space traditionally taken up by a male lead.

LYONNE: The secret to aging in Hollywood for women is to just start playing men [laughs], whether you write them for yourselves or find someone like Rian, and you get lucky enough that he writes it for you.

One of our shared favorite movies is The Long Goodbye. Elliott Gould's performance in that… So, when we started having our conversations about The Long Goodbye, I’m like, "Baby, baby, I got you. In fact, let's California split. Let's talk about Gene Hackman, not even in French Connection, but in Night Moves." We started talking a lot about The Dude [in The Big Lebowski]. Listen, there's been so many great roles for men over the years, like Jack Nicholson's done a wide spread of these pieces, to playing the Joker or starring in Wolf, a movie that doesn't get mentioned often. They’re allowed to be lone wolves who have thoughts and just do their own thing. That really is historically a man's game. It's very Martin Sheen staring at the fan in Apocalypse Now and "The End" [by The Doors] is playing. I remember seeing that scene and being like, ‘This is the kind of acting I want to do someday.’ I wanted to be Brando with "The horror, the horror," or Dennis Hopper being a photographer. And none of that was ever available to women. While I love Jessica Lange and Betty Davis and Barbara Stanwyck and, of course, Gena Rowlands and my favorite Giulietta Masina, where I really found my stride was sort of being without gender. I was allowed to essentially have an inner thought-life as opposed to this activated system of responses to a male protagonist.

JOHNSON: I will say that I think at least for me — I’ll talk about Russian Doll as opposed to Poker Face — my impression is that all the things you said are correct, but I don't see that as playing a man. I think that character has a lot of sexuality to her.

LYONNE: Well, first of all, thank you.

JOHNSON: Yeah. I think it's very essentially sexy, but I think it's seeing a woman in the role that you’re used to seeing men in and having that autonomy.

DEADLINE: That's exactly what I mean.

LYONNE: All my characters are sexy, baby. No, I’m just kidding around. But I just mean that they’re not following romance. That's not dictating their journey. In other words, following their romantic life is not at the core. If Nadia [in Russian Doll] is having a sort of philosophical, existential psychedelic journey to wherever she needs to go, Charlie is actually this lone wolf who's really fighting for the outsider, unlike Nadia, who's so Lou Reed and a shoegazer in New York. I think Charlie has the sun on her back. She's a desert rat, and she loves it, and she loves people. Their life choices are not run by chasing a boy.

DEADLINE: How did you two come to that together? Was it a discussion that you had early on?

JOHNSON: I mean that specific aspect of it, I don't think it was any kind of strategic thing we had a conversation about. It's just kind of our combined taste.

DEADLINE: Rian, you’ve said you wrote Charlie Cale for Natasha like "a bespoke suit".

JOHNSON: Yeah. I literally built the show around Natasha. The reason for the show is seeing her in Russian Doll and thinking, "Oh, she could hold a show like this together."

DEADLINE: You made the Poker Face era interestingly mutable. There are digital watch alarms, Charlie has no phone, Ron Perlman's character uses an ancient cassette player, there are retro vintage cars, but there's also super modern technology too.

JOHNSON: Yes, Charlie is completely buried in her phone, and that has replaced human engagement for her to some point in the pilot. And the whole thing of her smashing the phone at the end is the completion of this little character arc in the pilot, but it also detaches her from that, forcing her to get to know people in every new spot she's living in.

The bigger answer to your question is that it's very character-based for me. It's not like I want to be in a world without technology. It's fun to me to explore character. Like the Nick Nolte character who purposefully lives in the past, or Ron Perlman's character. I guess a lot of the characters are people who live in their own little weird bubble. And that anthropological aspect of that is very Columbo, doing a deep dive into these little bubbles of workspaces or people's lives.

The funny thing is, writing mysteries with Knives Out, I was kind of dreading like, ‘Oh God, is it going to be like in horror movies where they always have to figure out a way to not have cell service or something?’ The reality is with mysteries; I don't think technology actually gets in your way the way it does with other genres. At least I haven't found it to. So, it's not that I feel like dodging around technology is something we had to do.

DEADLINE: It felt like a nod to the ‘mystery of the week’ era though. Especially the digital watch. I miss those.

JOHNSON: They say everything old is new again.

DEADLINE: I was reminded of Knives Out's Marta (Ana DeArmas) climbing the trellis when we see Judith Light's character climbing the old folks’ home trellis in "Time of the Monkey", Episode 5. Was that deliberate?

JOHNSON: No. It's a coincidence, and it's entirely just because it came up in the mechanics of that [storyline], and I didn't even think about it until I was watching the cut put together, and I was like, "Oh, that's right." But it's also a little bit of a fun trope. That's one thing that I try and do in writing both the movies and the show is to not be afraid of tropes. I think in trying to do something in a way that feels invigorated and fresh, there can be a tendency to throw away anything that feels too much like a ‘been there, done that’ kind of thing. But I love the ‘been there, done that’ stuff. That's the meat of it, and that's the original gears that made the machine work, and that's what I’m after. So, embracing trellis climbing, I think, and embracing magnifying glasses and embracing…

DEADLINE: The old ice cube locked-room mystery trick? Except its dry ice you use to keep the trap door open in the "Exit Stage Death" episode with Ellen Barkin as your villain?

JOHNSON: One hundred percent. That's the thing. You’ve seen it a thousand times. To me, that's delicious, and I think not being afraid to lean into a good old-fashioned cliché and embrace that, I think it brings me great joy.

The episode where you turn a BBQ chef into a vegan because he saw Bong Joon-ho's film Okja made me laugh out loud. What does Director Bong think of that?

JOHNSON: I remember I emailed Director Bong and asked his permission to use it. And I was like, "I’m not going to spoil it, but I think you’ll like what we use it for." And he was like, "Yes." It was very sweet.

DEADLINE: Have you spoken to him since?

JOHNSON: I haven't. I don't think it is playing in Korea yet, so I’m not sure if he's seen it yet. But I should get in touch with him. That made me very happy when I came up with that. It was like, "Oh, this will be good."

DEADLINE: And Charlie's ability to read lies is reminiscent of Marta in Knives Out too. Marta vomits every time she lies. Obviously, you need a device to make Charlie a ‘detective’, but what is it about lying that keeps coming up for you?

JOHNSON: Well, I mean, in both of them, they’re mechanisms, but they’re two completely opposite ends. Whereas with the Marta character, it was an obstruction. It was something to make her life harder. It was a character we care about, and the only way they can get out of a horrible situation is by lying, and you take away their ability to lie in front of the detective.

So, it was an obstacle, whereas, in this one, it's the exact opposite. It's something to take the place of them being a detective and it being their job. And it's something that explains to the audience why she's specifically good at doing this, to give a little bit of a bridge into why she keeps getting into it every week. Now, we still — and this, to me, is a joyful thing because it's one of the hallmarks of the type of mystery TV show that I loved growing up — require a buy-in from the audience. There's still the Jessica Fletcher element of it. Yes, every place that she goes to, someone gets killed, and she discovers it, and we’re all going to agree that that happens and put our arms around it and have a good time watching the show. So, it doesn't completely bridge the gap, but at least it gives some reason why she's engaging with it.

DEADLINE: People think they’d love to have the ability to detect lies or force truth on people.

JOHNSON: No! Detecting lies, I think that would be hell. What was interesting about it to me was, I mean, first of all, having given her this gift for that reason, it presented a real problem. Which is, how is every episode not just over in five minutes? But that presented an opportunity — and this is one of the things I’m proud of, I think, working with the writers who were able to do this in the show — which was finding side doors into the gift. And in ways that explore with a little bit more nuance, the notion of lying, and the notion of what Charlie says in the pilot about how people lie constantly, but it's generally not about big, nefarious things. It's usually little white lies, and the notion of why somebody is lying about something is the actual key. So, that was a real beast to figure out in the writing room every day, but it ended up leading to something that was a little more nuanced and interesting and human than it just being a superpower.

I remember having a conversation about what it would be like if she was in a motel room, and she had a guy that she really liked, and he was sort of f*cking with her about being really into her? And she knew that he was f*cking with her, and how dark and what a bummer that would be as a woman, to know that the guy was being like, "Yeah, I’m super in love with you," and that he was lying. I was like, that would really break her heart.

DEADLINE: As much as I love that her life is not dictated by chasing romance, if there was a guy that was stringing her along, it would be fascinating to see her handle that.

JOHNSON: Well, that's something I could see us getting into in the future. We did talk a lot in the writer's room about what having this gift would mean to an actual human being. And I think the closest we got to really actualizing it in the show is with Clea [DuVall] 's character, Charlie's sister, and seeing a little glimpse of that, but we never really did a deep dive. I think that's fertile ground for going forward.

LYONNE: Although I would say in "Escape from Shit Mountain", which is easily one of the best episodes of the season, I think, what Rian and [the showrunners] Nora and Lilla [Zuckerman] did with it, it's fascinating, right? Doesn't that start with her really enjoying things with a guy, and the B-side of where that goes is the f*cking darkest journey in the entire season. It starts at the highest point, and it literally ends at the lowest of the low.

JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. And we almost did that on purpose because we thought, ‘Let's see her a little happy here for a sequence.’

LYONNE: But it does, I guess, set her up for the vulnerability of Stephanie [Hsu] 's character coming in. It's also interesting the way she plays with boys a little bit in the show, whether that's Adrien [Brody], or I guess not Benjamin Bratt so much, but…

JOHNSON: And I think that's something that could be very, very interesting. To figure out a way to explore what her gift would mean with someone you actually want to be close to and showing maybe why she isn't close to people, which is what the finale is about — why this life of unattached, keep-moving is the one that she's chosen for herself.

DEADLINE: She can't get close to people. Imagine how disappointing it would be to know every time they lied.

JOHNSON: Right. Absolutely. I think there are good people, but good people disappoint you. That's also why she has such a water-off-a-duck's-back type vibe to her. I think it's a survival mechanism. It's almost like you have to adjust by having a tremendous amount of generosity for human weakness.

LYONNE: That's beautiful, actually. The truth is that, and I would say it's something that I identify with greatly and love about playing Charlie, is this idea that all of those human failings that she's seeing is something that she's not blaming humanity for. You’ve never put it that way before. Rather than holding people to account or blaming them for it, of course, she wants to see justice around it. And especially for the little guy. There's something really profound about not being in a state of judgment around that almost.

DEADLINE: It feels like Season 2 will really explore the blessing-versus-curse personal side of her gift.

LYONNE: Rian and I did spend a lot of time talking about — and I don't even know if we want to talk about it here because who knows if that’ll be the thing we ultimately want to commit to in a second season — but we did spend a lot of time just talking about a core injury or something, or when was the moment where Charlie decided this is a double-edged sword and this is also something that can make my life crumble, so I’ve got to sort of keep it, but put it aside.

JOHNSON: Something involving her father, and I think we will inevitably get into that. I feel like both of us were also wary of doing the equivalent of a superhero origin story where suddenly you do the flashback to the thing that's the equivalent of being in the gamma-ray chamber, but emotionally. I guess for me, I’m willing to take the time to get to that, to figure out the version of it that's nuanced enough and interesting enough. That's the other tricky thing, figuring out a way to explore that in the context of a Poker Face episode, I think. But anyway, it's exciting to think about it.

LYONNE: I mean, life is more of a series of shitty events that lead you to have a personality change, ultimately, in a weird way. Oftentimes, I think people want to be reductive and make it this one thing that happened. I would say also one of the things I love about working with Rian is that confidence and resistance to traditional storytelling, essentially. You’re such a master of the classic form, it's like you make it your bitch, and it's like you know the information enough to know that it might not actually be the most fun thing for the audience to find out this backstory in this first season. I love that. It makes it so fun for me that you have the confidence of storytelling to say, "It's going to be baked into the DNA." You know so much about a person by the way they carry themselves and the things they do and don't say.

DEADLINE: What was the evolution of Episode 8 that Natasha directed and co-wrote with Russian Doll writer-producer Alice Ju?

JOHNSON: I mean, Natasha knew she wanted to do one of the episodes, and so I had this notion of doing something like a Phil Tippett-type character and doing something very based on movie monsters and stop-motion animation and having fun with that. And I also thought tonally, the episode would very much be sort of a Vertigo, Hitchcock-stylized thing. So, I threw it to Natasha, and I was like, "I think this could be really fun for you to do." So, she was in the writers’ room and she and Alice wrote it. I think Natasha, as good a performer as she is, at her heart she's a director. I feel like everyone is pushing her to make a feature. I think that's really where she comes alive and where she really shines. And knowing how good she is, as a performer, that tells you something, that now she's even better as a director. So, it was also really fun because I think the crew and everyone had known her as a performer, and then when we got to Episode 8 and she stepped up and took the wheel, everyone saw her for the first time, really, and that was pretty cool to see.

DEADLINE: Natasha, Cherry Jones has spoken so highly of your directing ability, that essentially you were inspiring and protective at the same time.

LYONNE: For Cherry to say those nice things, really, it's very moving to me, because I’m a workaholic, and so that's where I guess I’m getting my meaning of life, which is probably not a great idea.

I watched that incredible documentary on Phil Tippett, and it was just really this gift of, this is not something you usually do. And then it set us up as creative working partners for this thing that just really made [Rian and me] laugh constantly. The easiest way I can explain it is Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí having discourse around things. So, we were constantly having fun and then you add [Nick] Nolte, and Cherry is extraordinary. But a big thing for Rian was this kind of, "Let's lean in and not be afraid of Vertigo." So that was really where it was coming from that I was asking of Cherry to take the risk, to be a Hitchcock blonde, and be a faraway, distant thinker who periodically whispers to herself. Even in the costumes — she likes to wear her silk robes around the house, even if she's committing murder.

DEADLINE: That is so Hitchcock. I want to be a woman that constantly wears a silk robe.

LYONNE: You can accomplish this goal. This is within your reach.

I will say that the joy for me in directing on this show was being able to text with Rian 24 hours a day. It gave me that additional confidence of, "Holy Shit, we really are getting it. The Nolte stuff is really working, the Phil Tippett stuff, the elements are gorgeous, and Cherry is doing it." I’m sorry to be so almost emo about it, but if you’re obsessed with the arts in the way that I think we are, there's something very peaceful about that. The inverse of it is a constant state of chaos: "We don't know if it's right, we don't know if the choices are correct, we don't know." I’ve also been in those experiences with indecisive people, but the amount of fun that we were having getting to create this thing together was, I think, very rare.

And not to be weird about it, but I just think it's worth mentioning because we’re talking about gender in some way. That is also a very feminist action, frankly. And obviously, Rian is married to one of the smartest women in the world, in my opinion, one of the coolest, and that's how we even know each other. Karina is just an empirical genius. So, I do think that you see that in men who are not afraid of ‘big’ women and see women like that as a gift. Because boys rock, you know what I mean? It's really fun to be able to play together in that way. I just want to make a mention of that because I think it's so, so rare.

DEADLINE: What's next for you?

LYONNE: I really want to write and direct my first feature. That's become my priority, probably because I’m out here aging, and [thinking about] mortality, and I feel like I’ll be mad at myself if I don't do it. I’m just a movie lover that got ensconced in this television run from Orange is the New Black to Russian Doll to Poker Face. I’m so grateful, and it's been such an incredible time, but it's sort of left behind my true love, which is Once Upon a Time in America, All That Jazz.

DEADLINE: What about Russian Doll Season 3?

LYONNE: I think I’m seeing Russian Doll more and more as a Fire Walk with Me or something like the Twin Peaks journey, so you can have this kind of legacy to it. And then you’re allowed to kind of make a movie about it whenever you want, on your own timeline.

I’ve had a very weird path, and I’m very aware that this is a very special time for me. I’m very grateful that it's finally here. So, I just want to learn to develop some self-respect around that and play like the big boys, which is to follow where my instinct and interest is leading me. My job is to keep my head down and focus on the work. That's what I do. I work really hard, and I love what I do, and Poker Face is hard as hell. I’ve got to memorize 60 pages a week. You have all these brilliant actors coming in who want to do an incredible job. So, you have to help them find the key of the music that the tone of Rian Johnson is in, because if it's a guest director or something, they want to do a good job. It's almost like you’re also the mayor in a weird way.

And I love these jobs. But yeah, I think I just want to take a few years for me, now that I finally have them, to really say, what the hell do I want? I see other people have the self-confidence to do that, and I think for so many years, I was just going where it was warm and taking what I could get and being grateful to have a job at all. So, I’m trying to really get quiet and figure out what this new iteration means.

DEADLINE: And Season 2 of Poker Face?

JOHNSON: That's something that's really up in the air. I mean, a lot of it has to do with what happens in terms of the writers’ strike, and there's so much that's unknown at the moment. Also, right now my priority is getting the next Benoit Blanc movie going.

DEADLINE: Is that cast and ready to go?

JOHNSON: Oh, no. I’m still working on it. It's very up in the air.

DEADLINE: Do you have an endpoint in mind for Poker Face?

JOHNSON: No. Because this all comes from the notion of those shows that were meant to go forever. We’ll always find ways to keep the ball in the air, and that's its own fun challenge. It's figuring out how do we keep evolving and keeping it fresh, but the object of that is always going to be so that we can have mysteries of the week, and so that she can be in a different environment every week and we can keep doing what the show does well and keep doing it as long as people want to watch it. And again, to me, there's something very comforting about that. It's not like we have a four-season arc planned out and some big dramatic ending. No, as long as this is fun and as long as people keep watching it, let's give them new mysteries to watch and keep doing it.

Editor's note: This interview and photo shoot took place before the start of the WGA strike.

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