Poker Face’s Judith Light on Unconsciously Playing Irene Like a Teenager from ‘Euphoria’

Awards Daily talks to four-time Emmy nominee Judith Light about playing the hippie domestic terrorist Irene on Peacock’s Poker Face.

Judith Light can’t see her character on Poker Face as a villain—even if Irene did once have plans to blow up a Model UN meeting filled with teenagers.

“When you play a character, you can’t hold your character in that particular framework,” says Light. “You have to understand the character and what makes them do what they do. Of course, what they ended up trying to do was dreadful and terrible and too extreme, but I don’t hold someone as a villain. You have to be your character’s best friend.”

Light points out that there’s something else that’s makes her have an affection for Irene: the script.

“Wyatt Cain and Charlie Peppers wrote this fabulous episode, so they created these characters where you’d really come to love them. When you have someone like Epatha Merkerson, whom I adore and think she’s brilliantly talented, all the pieces came together.”

Of course, Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) also comes to love Irene and Joyce (Merkerson), but quickly learns that the two cool broads at the old folks home who were hippies in the 1970s also have a dark past that leads to a murderous present. Like Charlie, the audience, too, falls for the duo.

“People fall in love with them, and then they get this gut punch, and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, they went too far.’ It was extreme and that doesn’t work. You have to wrestle as an audience with those feelings about that, for sure. And remember: You’ve got a great director in Lucky McKee and of course Natasha Lyonne. You have this great combination of people working on something that orchestrates it in a way that delivers it to the audience and then they have to make their own judgments.”

During an FBI raid in the 1970s, Irene is shot and paralyzed from the waist down. Light details that the Poker Face set had a production assistant and medical consultant, Gary Baisley, who provided guidance and made sure everything was accurate in their depiction.

“That was very important to everybody, that we portrayed the dynamic of being disabled perfectly so that you can see it and that would be part of what you would be feeling for this particular person as well.”

Light had a “terrific” stunt double, but she also did some of the stunts herself and would have done more if they would have let her.

“You can say, ‘I want to do this!’ and they can say to you, ‘No, you’re not doing it.’ You have to be careful. There was stuff they did let me do, but then there was stuff, no, we’re not gonna let you do that.”

Spoken like a true rebel or maybe even a rebellious teenager from Euphoria, or “Euphorica” as Irene and Joyce unaffectionately call it.

“That was where [Irene and Joyce’s] relationship started and in a way was stopped in time, that they were these young pals, not necessarily teenagers, but that they carried that energy with them. That came from the writing. I didn’t think about [them acting like teenagers] consciously, but I see how that could come across like those teenagers in Euphoria that carry that kind of energy. There was something instantaneous between Epatha and me when we got together. We had a youthful dynamic.”

But was there more to Irene and Joyce? They almost come across as lovers with the way they look at each other.

“That wasn’t explicit, but if you listen, there was a sense that there was a three-way, and they make some reference to that. But there was some romantic or intimate dynamic. The real love, the real romance, the real relationship was in the connection of being in Bedford Women’s Prison together, following the paralysis that there was this care and love and responsibility. That is the love and the connection and friendship between the two of them, not necessarily romantic, but that there had been some sexual dynamic with Gabriel.”

Like Irene and Joyce, Light and Merkerson also had an unspoken connection.

“We didn’t ever talk about that. We just did it. That’s when you find a chemistry with someone who’s an extraordinary artist. We didn’t talk about a lot of things. We did talk to Lucky about scenes as we were doing them; we also knew that we had this overseer of the grand hand of Rian Johnson. They know how to put people together.”

Charlie of course stops the two in their tracks, with the help of FBI agent Luca (Simon Helberg), although it’s too late for victims like Ben (Reed Birney) and Betty (K Callan). Even though Irene and Joyce seem rather comfortable with taking people’s lives, Light, like the true best friend to Irene she is, thinks they don’t have it in them.

“I don’t know if they wanted to go back to Bedford; they just wanted to get even with him. I don’t know if they went on killing sprees. That doesn’t seem to be their M.O.”

Poker Face is streaming on Peacock.