Mass Murder
AFTER
KNIVES OUT
AND
GLASS ONION
, DANIEL CRAIG’S DETECTIVE BENOIT BLANC IS BACK TO CRACK A NEW CASE IN
Wake Up Dead Man
.
AND THIS TIME, HE’S GOING TO CHURCH. LET US PRAY…
WORDS BEN TRAVIS
Rian Johnson began hatching his latest murder plot in October 2022.
He’d already concocted death by pineapple juice; morphine mix-ups; lethal poisonings. The itch to strike again was rising. So he and his partner-in-crime, Daniel Craig, each lit a cigar and started imagining their next killer collaboration. Something darker, more sinister. Spookier. With Biblical implications. And more than just ideas sparked. “We almost burned down the hotel we were at,” laughs Johnson. “We set the smoke alarm off.” Add “arson” to the docket.
Thankfully, in Johnson’s world, plotting a murder only means cooking up a new Knives Out mystery; a fresh case for Craig’s genius detective Benoit Blanc, the Southern gent who sorts truth from fiction, right’uns from wrong’uns. As their second outing — the tech-bro-skewering Glass Onion — received its European premiere at the London Film Festival, the duo were reunited. And so, that evening, Johnson pitched where he wanted their third whodunnit to go. It was little more than a feeling, an instinct, to “bring it a little closer to the ground, do a small-town mystery again”, the writer-director explains. Following the sun-soaked private-island playground of Glass Onion — a film that was “exactly what we wanted it to be”, Johnson states — Blanc himself was all-in to go Gothic. “I loved the idea,” says Craig, “and I thought that he should go for it.”
The pair inbreathiated the moment (as Glass Onion’s language-abuser Miles Bron, played by Edward Norton, would say) — and lungfuls of tobacco. “It’s one of the things we connect over. I think I smoke more cigars than him, probably because I’m a writer,” Johnson laughs. “And so I have many more opportunities to avoid writing by smoking a cigar.” Too bad the obliging hotel staff — “very happy to put us in this secluded spot,” recalls Craig — failed to anticipate those voluminous Cuban plumes.
Still, the seed took root: three years later, Johnson and Craig have struck again, this time on holy ground. There is more foul play.
Clockwise from main: Daryl McCormack, Glenn Close, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner and, with his back to the camera, Josh Brolin; Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) with Monsignor Wicks (Brolin); Caught in the frame; Jud and an inquiring Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig); Director Rian Johnson and Craig on set.