It’s a wonderful thing to aspire to – to create characters that last,” says Rian Johnson, the genial American filmmaker who may well have created a couple of his own. He’s talking, here, about Charlie Cale, Natasha Lyonne’s louche, lie-detecting sleuth-on-the-road at the centre of one of the year’s best TV series, Poker Face. But he could just as easily be talking about Benoit Blanc, the drawling Poirot-ish detective played by Daniel Craig in Knives Out and its sequels. Or indeed some of the other totemic characters Johnson has temporarily stewarded down the years: Breaking Bad’s Walter White; Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s Luke Skywalker. Among the rogue’s gallery of Johnson’s oeuvre, Charlie Cale is in some pretty flash company.
“Natasha really is the show,” says Johnson, smiling guardedly down the webcam from his home in Los Angeles. “It goes beyond acting skill, beyond charisma: to be able to project that on screen and feel alive in a way that people genuinely want to see every week.” The 51-year-old writer and director is speaking to me a few days after the second season premiere of Poker Face – and several months before the release of his starry new Knives Out sequel, Wake Up Dead Man. It’s reasonable to describe Johnson as one of biggest contemporary directors in the world, when it comes to name recognition – thanks, in part, to the maelstrom of backlash that accompanied his brilliant but polarising Star Wars movie in 2017. It’s bewildering to think of the vitriol that once seemed magnetised to the mild-mannered and enthusiastic man conversing with me today.
