Now Lyonne herself has discussed the news, making it clear that she was pretty clearly hoping to get a break from the life of living lie detector Charlie Cale in order to focus on other gigs. (Albeit in a way where she makes it clear that she’s still a fan of both Johnson, and the series, which she’d remain as an executive producer on.) Talking to Deadline, Lyonne laid it out clean: “I love Dinklage, I love Rian, and we’ll see what happens. I could pop back up. I really need a few years; if I don’t make a movie before I die, I’ll be very bummed out. So let me just get one feature in the can, and we’ll see… I love Poker Face. I just would like to do a couple of movies for a second, and maybe I’ll see you again.”
It’s worth remembering that Operation: Dinklage Messiah is an entirely hypothetical concept in any case: Although Johnson has a fair amount of industry clout at the minute—his latest Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, is scoring strong reviews with its sporadic theatrical run ahead of a Netflix release—what he doesn’t have at present is a studio or streamer that actually wants to make more Poker Face.
As for Lyonne, she also addressed the other oddity that’s been swirling around her lately—and which touches on that filmmaking she’s so anxious to do. Talking about her upcoming film Uncanny Valley, Lyonne apparently stressed that it’s moving slowly because she’s taking her stated intent to use “clean’ AI—i.e., ones not trained by scraping huge piles of copyrighted materials—seriously: “When you’re not generating in Midjourney, it takes longer, basically, because it’s a team of artists in there. We’re looking at every image and kind of dialing it in. Everything I’ve done is always sort of a five-year span from inception to the touch-and-go cycle of cast coming together with the budget.” Lyonne, who’s signed industry pledges calling for increased safeguards against copyright infringement by AI training, reiterated past comments saying she doesn’t see use of AI tools as antithetical to human creativity: “I think it’s worth remembering that we need hope and new ideas, and to remember that we’re kind of the architects of this moment, and how we all choose to show up for each other is really key.”
