Daniel Craig will be returning as the esteemed detective Benoit Blanc in this winter’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. This entry will see Blanc being called onto a new case featuring Edward Norton’s billionaire Miles Bron and his friends on an island getaway where a dead body turns up. Craig was excited to reprise the role but found it challenging to try to improve upon what he felt they had already accomplished with the first movie.
Craig recently told Empire,
How the fuck do we take something that caught people’s imagination and made them talk about murder mysteries and do it again without it becoming a pastiche of itself? I’ve spent the past 15 years of my life trying to do that in a franchise, so I’m not afraid of it. If you’ve got the right people in the room and the right talent, then you can do it. Rian’s a genius writer and doesn’t want to repeat [himself]. Neither do we want to let people down; we want audiences to enjoy the world that we created in the first one and believe in this one.”
Something Craig needed to re-familiarize himself with going into this was his southern accent for Blanc. “I went away to work with an accent coach for three or four months before we started shooting [Glass Onion]. I’d forgotten the accent, and I didn’t want to do a pastiche. I wanted to make it as grounded and as anchored in reality as possible.”
Rian Johnson, the writer and director of the original, teases that we’ll be seeing more of Blanc this time around – as last time, he was more of a supporting character, whereas the main focus was on Ana De Armas’ Marta. Johnson explains, “There’s definitely more Blanc, but it’s not very interesting to me, the notion of building out Benoit’s life. Like with Poirot and Miss Marple, what’s fun is how the elements of Benoit’s character reveal themselves through his act of solving each one of these mysteries.”
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery also stars Kathryn Hahn, Kate Hudson, Lesle Odom Jr., and Janelle Monáe and will be available for streaming on December 23.
Are you excited?