In Knives Out and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Rian Johnson wrote mysteries so complicated that only Benoit Blanc could solve them. Johnson’s latest chapter, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, gives Blanc a run for his money, presenting him with his most layered and unexpected case to date. “This was the hardest script I have ever had to write,” says the twice Oscar–nominated filmmaker.
SEE: Knives Out / Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery / Wake Up Dead Man
The storylines and characters may differ, but each Benoit Blanc mystery delivers incisive social critiques through the lens of intrigue and humour, and Wake Up Dead Man follows in this tradition, turning the lens inward to explore the nature of belief.
“I thought a good way to bring the story down to earth would be to dig into something very personal,” says Johnson. “I told Daniel, ‘I want to make a movie about faith. I want to make a movie about the church.’ The world of faith and all the questions raised by a good murder mystery go together well. It seemed scary, so we dove in.”
“Whodunits are often set in creepy old houses or churches, so there’s plenty of material to mine for Wake Up Dead Man.,” says Daniel Craig. “That’s what we were doing with this: trying to get a different pace, feel, and interaction with a new cast. For me, as the regular character, the joy of it has been: ‘Who are we getting in to play this?’ These are audience-centric movies. They’re for people to watch, enjoy, share, and try to guess who the murderer is. But there’s also a deep message about humanity buried in there because that’s the way Rian writes. There’s always something to decipher at the end of these movies that’s not just about the case.”
Wake Up Dead Man is Johnson’s take on the locked-room mystery, a subsection of the genre mastered by author John Dickson Carr, known for novels like The Hollow Man. “A corpse is found in a locked room, a knife in his back, and there are no ways in or out,” says Johnson. “With such a constrained premise, there are only a few real options to work with.”
Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a boxer who became a priest, is sent to assist Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a small church in upstate New York. But he soon finds the parish has soured under Wicks’s reign of fear and anger. Wicks’s devoted flock — comprised of Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) — is indeed in dire straits. After a seemingly impossible murder rocks the parish and the town, local police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) calls in Blanc to help unravel the mystery, a case that pushes the boundaries of faith and reason. But, as Blanc describes, “This was dressed as a miracle. It’s just a murder. And I solve murders.”
This film is darker and more sincere than the previous Benoit Blanc films but no less funny.
“I don’t have a sense of faith, being a self-serious thing. I think it’s a very human thing, and that means there’s a lot of humour in it,” says Johnson.
Blanc’s approach to the mystery at the heart of the film is also vastly different from the previous two.
“He sees how important someone like Jud, a religious man, is to certain aspects of society,” Craig says of his character. “Blanc has a very complicated relationship with religion, but he’s also humble enough to know there’s something bigger happening than him at that moment.”
Just as much as the latest Benoit Blanc mystery forges its own path, Wake Up Dead Man is also a return to form for Johnson. “It’s more similar to the first Knives Out in that it gets back to the real origins of the genre, which predate Agatha Christie, going back to Edgar Allan Poe,” Johnson says. Most of the film’s drama unravels in a cavernous chapel built by Oscar-winning Rick Heinrichs. Chiaroscuro cinematography from Steve Yedlin, paired with a haunting score by Nathan Johnson, spot-on costuming from Jenny Eagan, and nimble editing by Bob Ducsay, only heightens the film’s atmospheric tone.
The rare tonal balance Wake Up Dead Man strikes is what drew many of the actors to it, and casting
directors Mary Vernieu (Promising Young Woman) and Bret Howe (The Menu) helped assemble another starry group. “What made me want to do the movie was the balance between comedy and Rian’s writing, which is always uncovering something that we don’t often see in a comedy,” says O’Connor.
Just as much as the ensemble were fans of Johnson and the Benoit Blanc mysteries, they jumped at the opportunity to learn from each other. “All of us at different moments have been No. 1 on the call sheet,” Washington says.
“But we’re coming together to be part of this larger ensemble, working together as a team.” It was Blanc’s most personal case to date and it may well be Johnson’s most personal film too. “I have strong feelings about faith: both my own personal experience and how it intersects with our country’s cultural and civic life, and the ways that intersection touches all of us differently. So it felt like rich ground for a good story,” says Johnson.
“All of these movies are about having a really good time. That’s the heart of where all of these came from — my memories of watching murder mystery movies when I was a kid and thinking, ‘This is the most fun a movie can possibly be.’”
A Conversation With Writer / Director / Producer Rian Johnson
Tell us about Wake Up Dead Man.
RIAN JOHNSON: Wake Up Dead Man is a Benoit Blanc murder mystery, and it starts with a young priest named Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor. He’s being disciplined by his church elders and is sent to a tiny, middle-of-nowhere parish in upstate New York. When he gets there, he immediately butts heads with the older priest who runs the parish, Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin. The two of them battle for the souls of the parish. The whole thing gets complicated when someone is murdered, and Benoit Blanc shows up to solve the case.
How would you describe the tone and visual style of Wake Up Dead Man?
JOHNSON: It’s incredibly different from Glass Onion. It’s got a much more Gothic and grounded tone. It’s still a Benoit Blanc mystery, so it’s funny and fun, but it’s set in an old stone church. There are lots of graveyards, and it’s got that earthy Gothic feel, which was really fun to play with. One of the things that’s fun for us about making these movies is that the murder mystery genre, as I experienced it growing up, is so diverse. Every time we make one of these films, it’s fun to think, “How can this one explore a whole
different corner of this genre?”
Knives Out, the first movie, was a cozy, family-mansion mystery. The second, Glass Onion, was a big, broad vacation movie — like Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, or Death on the Nile. Wake Up Dead Man is closer to Knives Out, but even creepier than that. It has a locked-door element. It gets into some of the mystery elements more intricately.
You’ve said before that John Dickson Carr is one of your favorite mystery authors. He’s known as
a master of a particular subset of detective fiction: the locked-room mystery. What is a locked-door mystery, and what does it entail?
JOHNSON: It’s a side alley of the whodunit genre: the impossible crime. In the most literal sense, this
is exactly what it sounds like. Usually, they involve some combination of ingenious contraption and
manipulated timeline. It’s the mystery equivalent of a Margherita pizza — possibly the purest test of
a pizza artisan’s skill in that its simplicity leaves nothing to hide behind.
What’s your process when writing a whodunit? Do you start with the solution? How do you construct the narrative?
JOHNSON:With this case, I knew I wanted to do an impossible crime. I wanted to take the idea of this miraculous-looking, impossible crime, with a man of faith at the center of the story. You have to start with the only thing that’s going to keep an audience engaged: “Who are your characters? What do they want? Why can’t they get it? Why do we care?” Once you have that story, you can build around the mystery elements and accentuate the parts that need juicing. The mystery element is not something that can support an audience’s weight. You have to start with a story, and then the mystery has to serve that.
Why was the church fertile terrain for a murder mystery?
JOHNSON: There’s a strong tradition of clerical mysteries. Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage is a classic, but my biggest influence for this film was G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. Themes of guilt, mystery, morality, and fallible humanity all feel right at home in a church, with a man of God at the center of the mix.
Wake Up Dead Man’s structure seems to echo Knives Out. Benoit Blanc is positioned more as an outsider to the story’s emotional core. Glass Onion brought Blanc closer to the forefront, making him the narrative lens and offering glimpses into his personal life. How did you think about Blanc’s evolution across the films, and what guides your choices in how much of him to reveal?
JOHNSON: My approach to Blanc is to use a really delicate touch. Once the mythology of a character starts expanding, it can suddenly become a burden on the storytelling. The character is going to be strongest if they serve the strongest purpose in each of the films. It’s more about asking, “How can we make this film something we haven’t seen in previous chapters? How can we surprise and delight audiences? What can Blanc’s role be here that we haven’t seen him do before?” I approach it that way as opposed to thinking, “Let’s learn more about Benoit Blanc.”
Knives Out drew its name from a Radiohead song, while Glass Onion took its titular inspiration from the Beatles song of the same name. Where does the title of Wake Up Dead Man spring from?
JOHNSON: Wake Up Dead Man shares its title with a 1997 song by U2 from their album Pop. Pop is a very underrated album, and that song is very right for the title. But I’ve had “Wake Up Dead Man” in my head for a long while, and I first heard the phrase in American folk music.
Powerhouse ensemble casts are one of the defining features of the Benoit Blanc murder mystery movies, and Wake Up Dead Man continues that tradition with gusto. You’ve described your casting process as curating a dinner party. In turn, the alumni have found that the warm, fun, and creative on‑set atmosphere translates into dynamic chemistry onscreen. How do you foster chemistry with such a big ensemble cast time and time again?
JOHNSON: On Knives Out, we shot a lot of the movie in this mansion in New England. The basement of the mansion was an old-school rec room. Instead of going back to their trailers, the cast would hang out down there and play games and tell stories. We realized this was really helping create camaraderie. So when we did Glass Onion, we always had a space set aside that was the green room. We were also trapped in a hotel together during COVID in Greece and in Belgrade, Serbia, so we had a lot of time with each other anyway. For Wake Up Dead Man, we did the same thing. We realised the experience of making these movies, and the chemistry between these incredible actors who are working as an ensemble, are the key to why we love doing them. You get great actors together, you let them hang out, and games will ensue. We’ve also been very lucky with each of these films to have assembled a first-class group of people who bond like a family on and off set, and that was especially true with this one.