Charlie Cale rides again!
Season two of “Poker Face” dropped last week and Jewish actress Natasha Lyonne is back as human lie detector and amateur detective Charlie Cale. Each episode features the wise-cracking Cale stumbling into a murder case while on the run from her mobbed-up employers. If that sounds like it has plenty of opportunity to get boring fast, you’re right. And yet, “Poker Face” finds a way to be fresh and sharp each week.
Though the show isn’t particularly Jewy — beyond Natasha Lyonne being Natasha Lyonne — the bevy of guest stars add a very fun and very Jewish component to the critically acclaimed Peacock series. In season one, Charlie Cale comes up against characters played by the likes of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Simon Helberg, Ron Perlman, Rhea Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, Noah Segan and Ellen Barkin. Plus, two particularly stand-out performances come from Adrien Brody as casino owner Sterling Frost Jr. and Judith Light as conniving retirement home resident Irene Smothers. That’s practically an egalitarian minyan!
Now, season two has added an entire new roster of guest stars (with a few returning from last season) and once again, there are plenty of Jewish actors to get excited about. Though not all of their characters have been revealed yet, let’s get to know the Jewish guest stars of “Poker Face” season two.
In alphabetical order:
Simon Helberg returns to season two of “Poker Face,” reprising his role as FBI agent Luca Clark. “It’s exciting to see how he fumbles up the ladder, starting from driving around geriatric retired ex-cons in witness protection, all the way to cracking these really significant cases for the FBI and getting into the shit,” Helberg told Variety last week. This season, part of “that shit” includes Agent Clark singing “Old Friends” from “Merrily We Roll Along” with John Mulaney (who plays another FBI agent).
Helberg has described his Jewish upbringing as “Conservative to Reform but more Reform as time went on.” He is perhaps best known for playing nerdy Jew Howard Wolowitz on “The Big Bang Theory.”
Carol Kane plays Lucille Lubinski.
Kane’s Jewish grandparents emigrated to the United States from Russia, Austria and Poland. Her big break came in 1975 playing Russian-Jewish immigrant Gitl in “Hester Street.” Though Kane never had a bat mitzvah herself, she played adult bat mitzvah student Carla in 2024’s “Between the Temples.”
“In my life, I keep getting parts where I get to learn different things. I just finished a movie where I got bat mitzvahed, and I got to learn a Torah portion,” Kane told Kveller in an interview for the Jewish show “Dinner with Parents” last year.
“‘Hester Street’ was my Yiddish training,” she added. “I’m really lucky. But none of [my Jewish knowledge] is off the cuff. It’s very hard-earned learning.”
Richard Kind plays Jeffrey Hasp, the husband of mob queenpin Beatrix Hasp. Unlike his wife, Jeffrey is not mobbed up. Instead, his passion lies with musical theater and specifically Jewish composer Stephen Sondheim.
Kind’s Russian Jewish family emigrated to New York in the first half of the 20th century. In an episode of “Finding Your Roots,” he discovered that he is descended from rabbis and religious leaders from the Pale of Settlement. “I believe that religion is just something that we go to to make us feel better or to give us some sort of foundation because the world is so full of chaos and we can’t really find ourselves. What I do believe is in my ancestors,” Kind said of this discovery in an interview on NPR. “And I believe that Judaism, that form of foundation must survive because these people gave their lives and they sacrificed and they believed in the Jewish religion and in the state of Israel.”
@peacock Learn the lyrics! 🙄 A new season of #PokerFace is streaming now on Peacock. #JohnMulaney #Musical #Theatre
David Krumholtz plays JB Turner.
Though Krumholtz is widely known as Christmas elf Bernard in “The Santa Clause,” he is Ashkenazi Jewish with roots in Poland and Hungary. In 2022, Krumholtz starred in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” a play about the many generations of a Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955. Krumholtz played patriarch Hermann Merz. “I’m doing the play in tribute to [my father],” Krumholtz told New Jersey Monthly Magazine. “It’s been a chance for me to reconnect with my own Judaism, which would have been my father’s dream come true.”
Natasha Leggero‘s character has yet to be revealed! Natasha grew up Catholic, but converted to Judaism as an adult. She is married to fellow Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher. Kasher grew up spending time in the Satmar community after his father, who was born to Jewish communist parents, converted to Hasidism when Kasher was 4. Kasher’s brother and Leggero’s brother-in-law is an Orthodox rabbi.
“Judaism’s a beautiful religion. You get to have a weekly Shabbat, which is like a party every Friday… You’re part of this beautiful religion, steeped in culture,” Leggero said in 2016.
B.J. Novak plays Hiram Lubinski. Though there’s currently no public information on this character, it seems likely that Novak’s character will be the son of Carol Kane’s character.
Novak attended Jewish day school at Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston as a kid and attended Jewish summer camp at Camp Ramah of New England in his early teenager years. His father co-edited “The Big Book of Jewish Humor” in 1981, and Novak has spoken about the importance of Jewish humor to his comedy. “I think looking at things with an outsider’s eye is very Jewish,” Novak said in an interview. “I think, ‘How can I somehow outsmart this bad hand I’ve been dealt?’ is the root of a lot of Jewish humor, and I think my favorite type of Jewish humor.”
Rhea Perlman also returns for season two as Beatrix Hasp, the head of the five families mob organization and owner of Hasp casino. Describing her performance, Vulture recapper Louis Peitzman says, “Rhea Perlman manages to pack the appropriate amount of menace and humor into her five feet.” High praise!
Perlman was born to a Russian and Polish Jewish family in Brooklyn. She’s played numerous Jewish moms in the past, but perhaps one of her most exciting Jewish roles is yet to come: playing a fictionalized version of Lena Dunham’s grandma Dottie in “Too Much.”
Simon Rex plays Russ Waddell. Rex describes his mother as “a New Jersey Jewish mom” telling GQ in 2021, “She’s always in my ear.”
“I’ve been learning a lot about my Ashkenazi-Lithuanian heritage. I grew up with hippie parents who didn’t really raise me, so the older I get, the more curious I am about my family’s past,” Rex told YNet in 2025. “I want to visit Israel and Lithuania one day — I need to learn about my heritage!”
He describes himself as “a good Jewish man.”
