‘Jackpot’ Director Paul Feig Snuck a ‘Spy’ Reference Into His New Amazon Comedy: “We Finally Got the Face-Off Machine Into Something!”

There’s a scene in Paul Feig’s new comedy, Jackpot!—which began streaming on Amazon Prime today—where Awkwafina uses a face-off machine to get a whole new face. If that line sounds familiar to you, congratulations: You have great taste.

In fact, the concept of “face-off machine” was a joke in Feig’s excellent 2015 comedy Spy, in a scene where the dim-witted agent played by Jason Statham proposes he simply “go into the face-off machine and get a whole new face” in order to complete his mission. (Likely, Statham’s character was thinking 1997 sci-fi flick, Face/Off.)

“Do you have quarters?” the CIA boss, played by Allison Janney, asks him. “Because it costs 50 cents.”

“What, I gotta pay?” Statham replies.

“No, because it doesn’t exist!”

It’s an objectively perfect and hilarious exchange in an objectively perfect and hilarious movie. So it will no doubt delight Paul Feig fans to see this joke referenced in Jackpot!, which stars Awkwafina and John Cena in a dystopian comedy about a lottery that gives losing ticket-holders a chance to kill the lottery winner and claim the jackpot. The movie, which was directed by Feig and written by Rob Yescombe, takes place in the year 2030. Apparently, in the year 2030, the face-off machine does exist.

After accidentally winning the deadly lottery, Awkwafina is forced to flee from the bloodthirsty mob. And what better way to hide than by getting a whole new face? In Jackpot!, the device is called a “prosthetics machine.”

Awkwafina selects the face of an old man with a goatee, sticks her head in the machine, et voilà!

And yes, that moment is a knowing wink to Spy, although Feig told Decider in a recent interview the idea was already in the script when he got it.

“We finally got the Face-Off machine into something, which I’m very happy about,” Feig told Decider. “That was in Rob’s Yescombe’s original script, and I just thought it was hilarious—to get to actually do what we’ve talked about in Spy.”

As fun as those scenes are for the audience, Feig noted that wearing all those prosthetics was not so fun for his lead star to film.

“That was many, many hours in the makeup chair for her,” he said. “I’ve done stuff like that when I was an actor, and it’s really not fun. It’s really uncomfortable. It’s really hot. Then they, OK, we’re on lunch!’ It’s like, ‘OK thanks. I have to eat my lunch now with this thing on.’ But she was a trooper. She did it.”

And presumably, Awkwafina didn’t have to pay 50 cents.