If you have been watching Poker Face season 2, you might have recognized Charlie’s “Good Buddy.” The man Natasha Lyonne’s amateur sleuth Charlie talks to on her CB radio is none other than Fargo actor Steve Buscemi.
As Lyonne told TVLine, her and Buscemi go way back as native New Yorkers: “He cut me out of a movie he directed called Animal Factory back in 1998. I played ‘Girlfriend.’ We joke about it to this day.” Lyonne says the team behind the show initially approached Buscemi to direct an episode of Poker Face, and while he was unavailable to work on the sophomore season, “he was available to be Good Buddy.”
Buscemi is one of many famous actors who appear throughout season 2 of Poker Face. Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito, Katie Holmes, and John Mulaney are just some of the numerous guest stars who will pop up throughout Charlie’s adventures.
Who is Steve Buscemi's Good Buddy in Poker Face?
Good Buddy makes his first appearance in season 2, episode 4 of Poker Face, where Charlie first uses her CB radio. In need of a lifeline and with no way to call a friend, she tries the radio out of desperation. The film crew installed this radio in the second episode after Charlie lent her car to production.
The actress described Good Buddy as “a real tether in the ether” as Charlie travels across America in her vintage car. Episodes often start and end with Charlie talking to Good Buddy about her life and her feelings, summarizing where she is in her life. While Charlie is open about her life, little is known about the mystery voice on the other end of the CB radio.
Showrunner Tony Tost explained that the concept of Good Buddy came about from his love of 1970s trucker movies and his parents own CB radios. “Smokey and the Bandit, Any Which Way But Loose, all those great cinematic exemplars from the ’70s. So we thought it would be fun.”
In an interview with Screen Rant, Tost warns fans to not expect Good Buddy to “intersect with the bigger plot” of the show and that he instead is going to be a companion type figure for Charlie.
The showrunner compared Buscemi’s character to Norm's wife in Cheers. “You never actually needed to see her, in a way, you wanted to imagine her in her world, in the same way I'm just delighted by imagining Steve Buscemi as a consummate New Yorker, driving a big rig across America. I like that version of him, so that's kind of what we're going forward with that character.”
While initially Tost was looking for a Burt Reynolds type to play Good Buddy, creator and executive producer Rian Johnson suggested that it’d “actually be interesting to go where we’re not expecting, with Steve Buscemi, kind of a consummate New Yorker, as this trucker. There’s something interesting there in the connection between [him and Charlie], too.”
Poker Face season 2 releases new episodes Thursdays on Peacock.