Natasha Lyonne

For sister showrunning duo Lilla and Nora Zuckerman, writing for Natasha Lyonne on a mystery-of-the-week drama series—each episode complete with its own ...

Lilla: It’s so funny, because I think you definitely needed that little bit of sparkly sunshine in the middle of that episode because so much of it takes place in the dark. I think Natasha has a way of getting right to the point in her way of addressing things. You want her to win, you want to be happy for her. What is the process of sitting down and saying, “This is where I want the story to go.” Do you know from the beginning what you want? It could come from a character, it could come from a world, it could come from the way we wanted to see the perfect murder happen. You always have a partner, you always have an ally, you always have somebody to look at and be like, “Was that crazy? It’s all part of the process of going through the story over and over and over again and finding those moments. For a lot of these episodes, we would have a world, maybe a couple characters—but until we latched onto what the spine of the story was going to be, we couldn’t get it going. She doesn’t at all play the same character in everything, but you see these elements of that person in every character. A lot of times in the writers’ room, you refer to the “story graveyard,” although somebody recently referred to it as a parking lot, and I was like, “I like that idea.” You just take the idea and you put it in a parking lot, and maybe you’ll pull it out later. “She has such a strong attitude and persona that she brings to the character,” Nora told RogerEbert.com of Lyonne. [Poker Face](/reviews/poker-face-film-review-2022),” thrusts Lyonne’s Charlie Cale into a life on the run, equipped with a foolproof ability to tell when someone is lying and the guts to call them on it.