Cynthia Erivo, Rian Johnson on Creating Her Quintuplets

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “The Game Is a Foot” Season 2, Episode 1 of “Poker Face,” now streaming on Peacock.

“Poker Face” writer Laura Deeley came up with the idea of featuring identical quintuplets for an episode of the whodunit series, and creator and director Rian Johnson thought it was “batshit insane in all the best ways.” But he wanted to give it a shot.

Johnson didn’t want to use anything fancy to pull it off. He wanted to dig into what a “Poker Face” episode looks like, and maintain that vintage aesthetic that had been established in Season 1 — but he wanted to use old-school camera trickery when it came to filming. Johnson says, “To me, that meant making sure we’re making every ounce of ‘What’s Up Doc?’ and French farce-like in one door, out the other, near misses and pretending to be different people.”

It also required a detailed amount of planning, with Johnson storyboarding every shot. “I had to be thinking while I was boarding, not just visually, but how to tell the story,” he says. “But also, which characters were going to be in it and which cameras could be at the setup at the same time and left there at the same time in order to get this thing.” Not only did Johnson have storyboards, he had maps. “I numbered all the angles. I’d say, ‘OK, we do angles one through three with her in this look, and then we leave camera two and three up, and we cover these two.”

But the key to pulling the episode off didn’t just come down to the team of artisans, it ultimately came down to Cynthia Erivo, the “Wicked” Oscar nominee who plays all five characters. “She was the reason we were able to shoot this episode in 10 days,” Johnson says.

The Season 2 premiere kicks off with Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) once again on the run from Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman), but there’s soon another mystery for her to solve. Jasmine Guy plays Norma, a family matriarch on her deathbed, and Amber (Erivo) is an aspiring artist who has dedicated the last few years of her life to caring for her sick mother. When Amber learns she’s been scrapped from the will, she goes on a mission to find metal artist, Felicity Price, a woman who lives off the grid, but is set to inherit everything. As it turns out, Felicity is a long-lost “secret” sister. Amber plots to kill Felicity and trade places with her. When Norma dies, the family gathers, and Delia, an apple picker (who works with Charlie); Cece, the professor and Bebe, the DJ, all head home to the family estate. Accompanying Delia, Charlie’s suspicions are aroused, and it’s up to her to solve the crime as Fake Amber and her sisters fight over the inheritance.

Erivo says she knew she wanted each of the characters to feel very distinct, and hair and costume were integral to helping her bring that to the roles. “I wanted you to be able to see the same face but see very different experiences in life,” Erivo says. “Because I think it added to the comedy, and it adds to how you feel about each of these women.”

She credits Johnson for trusting her to run with what she wanted to do. With Cece, Erivo added in French elements to the way the character spoke. “There was no French in the script — that was me, adding those moments where she can feel like she’s lived being French for a long time.” With Delia, Erivo wanted audiences to “fall in love with her — because I feel like she’s trying to live a good life, and be as honest as possible.”

Each sibling’s hair would also tell a story. “Bebe was a rave kid who found her way to DJing — I wanted something that felt like old-school rave culture,” Erivo says. “So we came up with the dreads, the dye and the bleach in it that there were colors all over it, so she felt like a true ’90s, stomping rave kid. Cece is desperately trying to be as chic and debonair as she possibly can. I loved the idea of having that wavy, fluffy Farrah Fawcett hair, but it’s still Afro. She’s taken beautiful care of her hair all the time, and it’s laid perfectly. The makeup is just perfect, and nothing is out of place. She’s always bothered and unbothered at the same time. I just wanted every one of those details needed to fall into place.”

Delia’s hair was straight and narrow. “It’s trying to be very uniform-like, and it’s a bob cut that’s not too much maintenance,” Erivo says. As for Amber, “She’s got all of this hair, but it’s wild and out there. It’s big and an Afro, and not really cared about. She’s all over the place.” She adds, “She’s trying to figure it out, but it’s not quite there yet.”

Helping create the distinct looks was New York based hair stylist Mia Neal, who had three days to get a multitude of wigs together. Neal had never met Erivo, nor did she have a model of her head. “I didn’t have her measurements,” Neal says. Initially, Neal turned the job down, because she wouldn’t be able to get everything done in time, and she didn’t have hair to make the wigs. But the studio was willing to step in to make sure Neal would get all the hair she needed, and on time. “I built one full wig, and did all the fronts for the other wigs, and I had people build the back of the wigs,” Neal says. “Because that’s the most tedious.” Neal finally met Erivo a few days later to do the final fittings, and also made sure each look was distinct — looks ranging from a straight bob to a DJ who sported long locs.

Since Erivo was playing all the characters, Neal didn’t want to slow production down, so she didn’t glue anything on. “It was imperative that the laces and wigs fit beyond perfection. I use these prosthetic bands on her head to be able to pin the wigs and lace.” Erivo’s shaved head also helped when she was between characters because no hair needed to be hidden or tucked away, and the prosthetic bands and pinning cut down on hair and makeup time.

Costume designer Leah Katznelson turned to the script to crack the distinct looks. There was a note referencing that Felicity hung the same jumpsuit in her airstream, so Katznelson took that and tried to find something period that would align with the vintage quality of the show. In the end, Katznelson says, the jumpsuit was contemporary, but was augmented to have a vintage quality. Once that was complete, the jumpsuits, which she had multiples of, were overdyed.

Cece was another one that Katznelson found through the script, which described her as a “French literature professor.” The costume designer landed on a three-piece tweed suit. “The high neck was changing proportion on her, so that visually helps to shift her face a little bit too, and proportion like that,” Katznelson says. “But it was really about having a romantic version. This is a woman who teaches the classics, and she likes to be inspired by that universe.”

Footwear was another important element Katznelson took into consideration, especially as it would change how someone would move through space and stand with their posture. She gave Cece a block heel, which she describes as a “feminine version of a man-tailored Oxford shoe.”

As for Bebe, Katznelson didn’t want the DJ character to feel dated, and she looked through photographs for inspiration. “I looked at FKA Twigs and her styling. That became the spark to pull the club scene and contemporary music look together.”

Once the looks had come together, blocking and filming came next. Cinematographer Jaron Presant used the rehearsal time to figure out his shots and where split screens or doubles would be used. “For every role she played, we had a double that also knew all the lines, and they had a wig and wardrobe to match,” Presant says. “There was somebody else to stand in the frame that she could react against. Cynthia would run around the room and go to the next spot, and then run around the room to the next.”

Even right down to the edit, editor Bob Ducsay used old-time techniques. “The first time Amber meets Felicity, it was multiple takes of Amber in the frame, and then multiple takes of Felicity in the frame,” Ducsay says. By having that many shots, he was able to make choices, and work with Erivo’s performance “as much as I wanted.”

The fight sequence with Amber — as she tries to kill Felicity again — was simple to piece together, and Ducsay used multiple techniques. “There are face replacements when they’re rolling on the ground, and that was the most advanced thing we did. Also, we used the conventional split-screen done very simply with the camera panning, and the operator replicating the speed carefully so we could piece the two things together.”

When the siblings come together again, Ducsay explains that those scenes were the challenging ones to edit. “We know we’re going to do splits on everybody. The more you do that, and the more of these characters that you bring together in the same scene, the more complicated it becomes.”

By the end, Charlie puts things together and realizes that Felicity is not really who she says she is. She finds a way to expose Amber, by dropping a sharp object on her foot, since Felicity had a prosthetic foot.

“That boot needed to do a lot of things,” says Katznelson. It needed to have a high enough heel and thin enough leather for Charlie to puncture the shoe as part of the story. “It also needed to have that punk-aesthtic, and it needed room for the special effects team to spray blood everywhere,” Katznelson says. In the end, she acquired 10 pairs of boots for the scene.

As for the “poker face” fake Amber puts on, trying to hide her pain, editor Ducsay had fun with it. “You want to draw the moment out as much as you can because it makes it funnier,” he says. “She’s trying to pretend that this is not that she’s in unbelievable pain. We had such great material from Cynthia — and Natasha too, of course — that it was lovely once it was put together.”

That scene required Erivo to dip in and out of the different characters, each needing a costume and makeup and hair change along with it. “We would end up filming each character twice, almost, but you would have done four characters before you come back to the beginning,” Erivo says. “It was thrilling.”

Erivo had doubts about whether she could do it all effectively and convincingly. “They’re all doing different things, and they’re all moving in different ways, and they all have different mannerisms, and they all sit very differently, and they all move differently, and they speak differently, and they have different types of voices,” Erivo says. “It’s about remembering each time you drop into the next character, where they are, who they are, what they sound like, what they move like, what they look like, all of that without completely combusting on the inside.”

“It was so much fun to do it,” Erivo says. “And so much fun to flex those muscles.”