Wake Up Dead Man cast reveal Knives Out film's relevance to "scary times" we live in – and who has pitched a return for a sequel

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

“There’s a bit of everything in Benoit.” Daniel Craig is pondering the inspiration for his performance as the eccentric gentleman-detective Benoit Blanc in writer/director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. “Peter Ustinov’s Poirot from Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun is there, but also Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, which is ridiculous but kind of glorious. Like every other actor, I’m a magpie. I think, ‘I’ll have a bit of that.’”

Blanc’s southern drawl and mannered bearing, his penchant for ramping up the dramatic tension as he reveals who has committed the crime, his moral outrage and, perhaps as important, his elegant tailoring, were first seen in writer-director Johnson’s Knives Out, the meticulously plotted 2019 Netflix film that channelled the Agatha Christie golden age of crime into contemporary America.

That reinvention of the genre was a huge success – so successful, in fact, that there was some disappointment when the second film in the series, 2022’s Glass Onion, featured tricksy exploding sets and slightly overdone performances. Including, some said, Craig’s.

“There was criticism that I was over the top,” he says, as RT spends a day with the cast ahead of the release of the third instalment in the franchise, Wake Up Dead Man. “But I always try and remind people, that’s what he was supposed to be. The whole point of the movie was that Benoit Blanc was a caricature of himself, he was attempting to disarm these awful people.”

Still, there are no worries about tone in Wake Up Dead Man. This is a scorching return to form, aided by Johnson’s decision to swap affectations like Glass Onion’s sun-drenched billionaire island for a dark American-gothic setting, with Epping Forest in Essex standing in for upstate New York. There is also a standout performance to put alongside 57-year-old Craig’s.

Previously best known in the UK for playing Larry in The Durrells and Prince Charles in The Crown, Josh O’Connor is, at 35, rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand actors in the world. Here he plays young Catholic priest Father Jud Duplenticy, who, before taking holy orders, had been a professional boxer until he killed a man in the ring.

Guilt-racked Duplenticy is sent as a penance of sorts to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a rural church in the settlement of Chimney Rock. Here he must serve under ferociously reactionary priest Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin as a MAGA monsignor railing against the sin and weakness of what he sees as a “woke” world. In response, Father Jud offers understanding for man’s weakness and the grace of God.

If Glass Onion, with its face masks and sealed island-setting, played with Covid-era themes of isolation, then Wake Up Dead Man is addressing the cultural and political gap between left and right. For some of the American cast, Johnson has clearly made a film about contemporary divisions in the US.

“I have to bite my tongue now, way more often than I used to, 100 per cent,” says Mila Kunis, who plays local police chief Geraldine Scott. “Somebody asks ‘What’s your favourite taco?’ If I say beef then the chicken people are going to be all upset with me. If I say chicken the beef people are going to be upset with me. Everything is politicised now, that’s the truth.”

Glenn Close, who plays parish spinster Martha Delacroix, Wicks’s greatest supporter, likewise worries about America’s direction of travel. “I think about that a lot,” she says. “We live in scary times.”

Father Jud is fighting for control of a parish that Wicks runs as a personal fiefdom. His all-star parishioners also include Jeremy Renner as Doctor Nat Sharp, Andrew Scott as Lee Ross, a formerly bestselling novelist, plus Kerry Washington as lawyer Vera Draven and Cailee Spaeny as disabled cellist Simone Vivane.

As you might expect, everyone has their own dark secrets. As you might also expect, there’s soon a murder; the victim’s body found in an apparently sealed changing room, just off the altar. Baffled police chief Scott calls in Blanc who declares it, with relish, “a classic impossible crime”.

Johnson is returning to the nuts and bolts of detective fiction, particularly drawing on the US writer John Dickson Carr, whose 1935 novel The Hollow Man – referenced in the film – is regarded as the great American example of a locked-room mystery. And, as the genre demands, in this film there is a solution in the end – one so satisfying it goes some way to explaining why murder mysteries are so popular again.

After all, the original golden age of Christie and Dorothy L Sayers came after the slaughter of the First World War and during the disaster of the Depression. With contemporary society so fractured, perhaps we are drawn to someone, anyone, who can work out what is happening. “There’s something very satisfying about a conclusion when it’s all wrapped up at the end,” explains O’Connor. “We don’t always have that in life and we find pleasure in it.”

Still, entertaining as Johnson’s plotting mechanics are, it’s the ensemble performances that make this film so compelling, in particular Glenn Close’s occasionally grand guignol turn as Delacroix, a devout woman forever marked by a traumatic childhood experience in the church.

It’s something Close understands well because her family was enmeshed in the socially conservative Moral Re-Armament movement when she was a child. “From seven to 22 I had a cult-like upbringing, so I knew the territory,” she says. “If you’ve had that kind of experience when you’re so young, it stays with you always.”

Rian Johnson has recently talked about his own very religious evangelical Christian upbringing and the effect it had on him and Wake Up Dead Man, revealing, “that’s where this whole thing came from.”

His film offers two contesting kinds of faith (three, if you count Blanc’s rigorous atheism as a form of belief). Wicks’s faith is based on Old Testament vengeance, Duplenticy’s on New Testament values of love and forgiveness. “You sense Josh recognises a little bit of himself in Duplenticy,” says Craig. “And he feels a need to mentor or to nurture him.”

O’Connor, who was brought up as a Catholic, agrees. “I definitely have faith, it is very present in my life,” he says. “I went to church every Sunday. I was an altar boy but was kicked off for smiling too much, which was a bit mean. But I think the thing that makes Jud and I more aligned is that my parents, who I would describe as socialist Catholics, believed in hope, in doubt, forgiveness and reconciliation.”

While Craig is always the main draw on these movies, in this film’s co-lead, O’Connor, he almost meets his match. But the rising star sounds surprised by his own fame when I ask if he remembers the moment he knew his career was taking off. “Well, I’ve just wrapped on a movie with Joel Coen and I did this movie with Steven Spielberg this year, which is insane. So maybe this is the moment, actually right now, in this room.”

He remains remarkably modest in the face of unstinting praise from his colleagues. Close compares his performance as Father Jud to a Hollywood great. “Josh is like Jimmy Stewart,” she says. “He really has that wonderful quality, a goodness that will be a comfort to people.” Craig states simply, “Josh is brilliant – you just want him to shine.”

In their jobs Craig and O’Connor have different, although complementary, approaches. One intensely physically disciplined, the other a little less so – as suggested by their interactions with the film’s personal trainer. “We were in the gym every morning,” says O’Connor.

“Well, I was in the gym some mornings. Daniel was probably in the gym every morning. But it was important to me, that this guy who was a boxer looked like it.”

Could O’Connor take a punch? “I actually was punched in the face by an 11-year-old when I was 15. We went to a skate park in my home town and this boy who was a lot younger than me came up and said, give me your skateboard. I said, no. And then he punched me in the face and gave me a bleeding nose. Being punched by an 11-year-old, if you’re 15, is mortifying. But it was a long time ago.”

O’Connor gives Craig the credit for his role in Wake Up Dead Man. “Daniel is a really incredible human being,” he says. “He’s so generous with his spirit and he brought me into Knives Out. He was the one that alerted Rian to my work. I didn’t know that until yesterday, actually, and it’s a big deal.

“Daniel is also a proper actor. I think we sometimes forget, because of Bond maybe, that his body of work is extraordinary and diverse. He can do tragedy, comedy, grief, drama, everything. And as a person, he’s just a pure collaborator – incredibly full of self-doubt and self-loathing and not knowing whether he’s doing the right thing and constantly saying to me, ‘What do you think about that?’”

Self-doubt? Self-loathing? Daniel Craig? That’s not what we expected. “Completely,” says O’Connor. “It’s partly because what he does with Bond is so confident. But that’s not him at all. He’s like a boy. He’s sort of this sweet, insecure man who is incredibly charming and brings you in. He’s brilliant. I loved working with him.”

All the actors I speak to say, in their different ways, how much they enjoyed working with each other. “We were in a green room together all day, every single day,” says Andrew Scott of filming. “We didn’t go back to our trailer, we just all hung around as a group. Being in scenes with nine people is unusual and doesn’t happen a huge amount in movies, so we all got to know each other really well, they are just a great bunch of people.”

For Kunis, “The atmosphere was unbelievable. I have already pitched myself multiple times for Knives Out number four. I know it’s never going to happen… but it could.”

“They’re all of a very high calibre,” says Craig. “Working with someone like Andrew Scott, or Glenn, you have to raise your game. You don’t have a choice, really. I mean, it’s s**t-or-get-off-the-pot time. When Glenn Close is on the set it’s, ‘Oh, OK, right, we’d better all be good then.’ You can’t be cagey, you have to come and meet her. And, you know, she’s there to have fun, but she’s also an incredibly serious actor.”

He’s not wrong – when asked, Close describes this film to me as “Shakespearean”.

“There’s a certain kind of order, then disorder comes in, and then it’s restored, either comically or with drama. And I love the ending of this movie. I think it will surprise people.”

Faith, death, desire, revenge. To go back to an earlier question, perhaps we like whodunnits so much because they allow us to confront the big stuff whilst being entertained. But Craig stops me dead right there. “These movies are not whodunnits,” he admonishes. “Those are the worst kind of movies. Yes, there is a denouement at the end, but it’s a denouement with a twist. And that’s part of its genius.”

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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in UK cinemas now and is coming to Netflix on 12th November. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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