A funny thing happened during the Wake Up Dead Man press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival. A star of the new Knives Out mystery clearly didn’t get the “no spoilers” memo from writer/director/producer Rian Johnson.
When the conversation turned to a potential Knives Out: All Stars movie that one of the cast members was pushing for, another of the stars quickly laughed, “I can’t, I’m dead!” (Obviously, we won’t say who!)
The line got a huge laugh from the crowd, although in my case, it was definitely a lesson in seeing the film before attending the press conference and not planning to do it in reverse to facilitate TIFF schedule Tetris.
However, if someone’s going to spoil a movie, one can probably do worse than one of Hollywood’s finest spilling the beans.
But the unfiltered spoiler alert, or lack thereof, doesn’t really diminish the charm of Wake Up Dead Man. Even if one knows the ending, this Knives Out mystery still plays like a million bucks. (Read Emma Badame’s review of Wake Up Dead Man here.)
The third film in the popular whodunit franchise sees intrepid private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) visit a small and tightly-knit church-going community where a leader among the flock gets bumped off mid-service. This entry in the Knives Out world plays much darker than the breezy puzzler of Glass Onion, but it still delivers the laughs with a healthy sense of dread.
“So rarely, if ever, you get a series of three movies where one doesn’t jump the shark, let alone the third,” admits star Mila Kunis, who plays the local cop who assists/butts heads with Blanc. “We can go on and on and on about the complexities of the themes and the characters and the dynamics that [Rian Johnson] built about things that are very complicated and risqué. No one wants to talks about religion. No one wants to talk about politics. And this is the most beautifully threaded storytelling…You’re never just stuck watching a whodunit.”
As Blanc investigates the faithful members of the parish—all of whom are suspects as Wake Up Dead Man draws upon classic elements of the locked room trope where the killer is presumably one of the bodies in the room—his inquiry reveals the hypocrisy of the church and its followers. Everyone has a motive, from the new priest, Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), who was exiled to the parish after clocking one of his colleagues at his former church. Father Jud, meanwhile, always seems to be on the verge of slugging his tyrannical superior, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), at the new place.
“These movies, the first one, was very much about family. The second one, we wanted to do a big, broad vacation blow-out mystery, like a comedy. And this one, I wanted to tuck it back in a little,” explains Johnson. “I grew up very religious. I didn’t grow up Catholic. I grew up Protestant, what we’d call Evangelical. It wasn’t just that I was brought to church with my family. I was, personally, very religious. And through my early 20s, I really framed my life and the world around me through my relationship with Christ. It was something that was really, really a part of me.”
Johnson says he drifted away from religion, but many of his family members still hold close to their faith. “Anyone who was truly religious will tell you, it never really leaves you,” Johnson continues. “For me, I’m writing a movie that, first and foremost, is an entertaining mystery but I have Blanc and Jud inside me. I have both those parts of me, so to write a movie to let those two talk it out was also therapeutic.”
One can only imagine the parts of Johnson’s life that inspire the colourful ensemble that Blanc encounters in Father Jud’s church. The churchgoers all have their own shades of gray from Wicks’ uptight assistant (Glenn Close) to a former cellist (Cailee Spaeny) pouring money into the church with hopes that it will heal her disability. There’s also a hack writer (Andrew Scott) searching for his next hit, a secretive mother (Kerry Washington) and her influencer “son” (Darryl McCormack), and a town doctor with a drinking problem (Jeremy Renner). It’s another murderers’ row of stars to keep audiences guessing as Blanc sniffs out the killer.
“For movies that are genuine ensembles, it becomes incredibly important who’s number one on the call sheet,” Johnson observes. “Because they are gonna set the tone on set. And they are the ones who everyone’s looking to when they step in on day one. And to have [Daniel Craig] there, I mean, these movies wouldn’t function without him in so many ways. Even down to the accent—that’s not something that you just rattle off.”
Johnson calls Craig a “true creative partner” in the Knives Out world in that regard.
“I don’t read them as a kind of a whodunit. I read them as a whole and what they mean. For me, the most interesting thing about a film is the interaction between [Blanc] and the other characters,” adds Craig. The star echoes Kunis’s sentiment that Johnson’s exploration of organized religion and hypocrisy elevates Wake Up Dead Man beyond a mere murder mystery. “We’ve always played the most intelligent person in the room in,” Craig continues. “If you watch them [whodunits] collectively, everybody is like, ‘Come on, it must be…’ and there’s a sort of buzz that happens. That was very apparent last night in the cinema [during the world premiere at TIFF]. There’s people buzzing as it unfolds. But it’s only doing that because there’s brilliant actors in it who are at their A-game, playing a great script that is watertight and giving you all of this joy. And without that, it’s just, you know…shit.”
That buzz arises as Blanc finds a great foe in Wicks’ assistant, Martha, who presides over the parish as its caretaker, administrator, and resident lurker. But Martha also embodies that parish’s struggle to change with the times, as symbolized by her frumpy high-collared ’fits. Close says that her take on Martha isn’t based on anyone in her own life, but that Martha’s funereal costuming helped her crack the character.
“One of the first steps for me, and it kind of always is, is my first costume fitting,” explains Close. “When I saw the costume, and the uniform that she wore, I started to understand who she is—belted in. I wore a crucifix that I actually had worn in House of the Spirits.” Close’s character in that Meryl Streep period piece wore her crucifix in scenes set in 1946, if that gives a sense of Martha’s conservative nature. “For me, it’s 98 percent imagination and then you fill that in,” says Close.
The actors admit that going toe-to-toe with Close proved intimidating. “On one of our first days, when we were all finally in a room together, [it was] Cailee’s very first day with the entire cast, and she had her cigarette in her hand, and her hand was shaking,” says Washington. “And Glenn was like, ‘What a beautiful choice.’ [Laughs.] Like, what an excellent choice to make the character shake with nerves. [Laughs.] And Cailee was like, ‘I was just so nervous to be on my first day in a room with all of you.’”
The shaky hand makes the cut, as does the crucifix. Moreover, Johnson says that all these small details are part of the show for the audience. Wake Up Dead Man has fewer production set pieces than Glass Onion does—this film leans less heavily on dazzlingly production design—but Johnson still feeds lots of visual clues to the audience through costuming, props, and subtle elements of direction in the performances that reward repeat viewings.
“The reality is, the more you do murder mysteries, the more you realize it needs to be a rollercoaster as opposed to a crossword puzzle, and the audience needs to be riding the story. That means clarity is job one,” says Johnson. “You can have a very intricate thing as long as in the moment the audience is clear what they’re following, what the characters on screen want, and why. So the more intricate it gets, the more the number one job becomes [important] – and that’s just the fundamentals of any storytelling.”
While Wake Up Dead Man arguably plays as the most serious Knives Out yet, Brolin remarks that playing that rolling coaster, particularly in Wicks’ fire-and-brimstone sermons, was a lot of fun. “The humour in this [film] is designed,” he says. “It’s obviously performance-driven, but it’s designed, the placement of the humour, and I love humour that comes out of tension.”
For Andrew Scott, who makes the most of a comedic turn after a string of dramas, he says the atmosphere and camaraderie in the cast helps keep the action light and lucid. “You want the same feeling that you have in the green room that you do on the set, particularly when you’re in a comedy, when you think this is sort of absurd, so that you’re relaxed,” he explains. “You’re listening, and when you’re listening, you’re able to understand the absurdity of any situation. The things that make us laugh the most, I think, are bloopers. That’s the thing with bloopers—it makes everybody laugh, and that’s what it’s like being on a set, a blooping set,” he laughs. Audiences will want to stay through the credits, as Wake Up Dead Man delivers laughs well past the story’s end.
The film’s ensemble also greatly assists in landing the biggest twist of this Knives Out: Benoit Blanc doesn’t appear until roughly an hour into the film. Instead, Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud takes the lead and juggles his roles as investigator and prime suspect. While O’Connor wasn’t present at the TIFF conversation, Craig says that the changes to his detective character over the course of the Knives Out franchise keeps him fresh.
“I want to keep him as enigmatic as possible because, ultimately, yes, I’ve got this great part, and I can come in and I get these great chances to make these lovely, amazing speeches that Rian writes. But it is literally his interaction with everybody else. That’s the only thing that matters in the film,” says Craig when asked about the backstory introduced in Glass Onion about Blanc having a male partner. “Because him discovering and trying to get relationships with them is reliant on everybody else. And that’s the top of the agenda. So all that other stuff, yes, I’d love if we carry on, hopefully we’ll play around with it a bit more and give maybe a little more indication. But that’s just not front and center.”
On that note, though, Close jumps in to give credit to their co-star who isn’t at the party. “In Josh O’Connor, we have discovered the new Jimmy Stewart,” she says. “I think he is an actor of incredible heart and humanity and kindness and humour. I think his performance in this movie is masterful. You know, [Rian] wrote a beautiful part…he holds this movie together with kindness and passion.”
“Yeah, he’s all right,” Craig agrees with a laugh.
He could probably join Knives Out: All Stars, too, if he makes it through this one.
