It’s Saturday night at TIFF and the cast of Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man, are readying for their premiere. Among the group gathered at the Deadline TIFF studio, only Johnson knows what the finished product looks like, since his cast are yet to see the film. The atmosphere is one of both excited anticipation and a raucous family reunion.
Daniel Craig, whose Southern gentleman gumshoe character Benoit Blanc is at the center of all three Knives Out films, told Deadline: “This one owes a lot to locked-door mysteries, which are impossible crimes that don’t really have to make sense and that have no logic to them. They don’t seem to add up on first viewing. And also thrown into that is a religious aspect of faith and belief and all of those things.”
Johnson revealed that this time around, Benoit is facing a darker mystery than in films past, with religious intrigue centered around its priest protagonist, played by Josh O’Connor, and with gothic elements inspired by the classic works of Edgar Allen Poe.
“One of the things I love about the mystery genre is that it contains a whole spectrum of different types of stories,” Johnson said. “And so with the first movie, it was kind of a cozy Agatha Christie whodunit. The second one was a big, broad, comedy blowout vacation movie mystery. And so with this one, it is Edgar Allan Poe, which is where the genre started. Murders in the Rue Morgue is commonly considered one of the early prototypes of this genre. And given the topic here, we were going to have it be a clerical mystery and have our priests here, I figured it figured gothic made sense.”
Josh O’Connor stars as Jud Duplencity, a priest sent to a remote outpost in Upstate New York, who becomes a kind of sidekick to Blanc in solving the mystery. “I’d played a priest before,” O’Connor said. “I played Mr. Elton in an adaptation of Emma years ago, and I grew up Irish Catholic. I find Rian and I had chats quite early on about how interesting it is that you can have two priests who believe in the same god, but fundamentally in such a different way that one person can see this god as a fearing, punishing god, and that another one with the totally same belief about this church and this writing, can see that god as a forgiving, all-loving god. So that was interesting to me immediately as a dynamic. And then when you’re playing into the sort of narrative that has guilt and remorse and shame and everything else running through it, that’s just interesting to be played by someone who believes in forgiveness and faith and hope. So I like that sort of dynamic.”
Mila Kunis stars as the local cop who, stumped by mysterious events, calls in the cavalry otherwise known as Benoit Blanc. “I said I would do the movie without knowing any characters or reading the script, honestly, because I wanted to do,” she said during the panel interview. “I’m such a fan of the series, and I was like, “What an honor, and absolutely, I’ll do whatever.” But to give you a description, she’s not the greatest cop, you know? I mean, she does the best she can with what she’s got, and calls Benoit for help solving a crime that happens in her town.”
The all-star cast on the panel at the Deadline TIFF studio included Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Josh Brolin, Cailee Spaeny and Daryl McCormack.
Craig explained that Johnson encourages camaraderie on set. “The last one was very particular because it was Covid, and we were locked into a hotel so we couldn’t go anywhere. But it’s really important for the movies that from day one, we form a working relationship, and the best way to do that is hang out with each other. So no one goes to their trailers. We have a green room that we all sat in, Andrew slept in, and we just joked a lot and just had a lot of fun.”
Close, whose character is named Martha Delacroix, said of that experience, “It was great fun. We had a movable tent. They would put down a kind of a little carpet and then bring in an air conditioner in the middle of a forest, so it was fantastic. It was just so boring to go to your camper, why would anybody do that? So we really, really, we laughed a lot. We told stories. Josh [O’Connor] wrote a speech for a Best Man at a wedding, and we gave him notes. Kerry [Washington] and I had our dogs, which always adds a wonderful dimension. Jeremy Renner, when he first came, I thought, well, he was really kind of the quiet one. We knew he was recovering from his terrible injuries. But at the end, he was one of the funniest. And we played backgammon. Mostly Mila and I.”
To watch the full conversation with Rian Johnson and the cast of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, click on the video above.
The Deadline Studio at TIFF is hosted at Bisha Hotel and sponsored by Cast & Crew and Final Draft.
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY
Section: Special Presentations
Director: Rian Johnson
Screenwriter: Rian Johnson
Logline: Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) faces his most dangerous mystery yet in the latest entry in Rian Johnson’s beloved Knives Out series.
Panelists: Rian Johnson, Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack
Distributor: Netflix
