‘Glass Onion’ New Trailer Released, Rian Johnson and Cast Describe Their Great Experience Making the Film
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). (L-R) Kathryn Hahn as Claire, Leslie Odom Jr. as Lionel, Dave Bautista as Duke, Janelle Monáe as Andi, Kate Hudson as Birdie, and Jessica Henwick as Peg. Cr. John Wilson/Netflix © 2022.
We are now in the final countdown before the theatrical release of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which will be screened in 600 venues across North America on November 23. A new trailer has been released, giving us a closer look at the new mystery crafted by writer/director Rian Johnson.
In addition to the trailer, which you can watch at the end of the article, Entertainment Weekly has published a new piece featuring interviews with the cast and crew, as well as some new stills from the movie. Johnson explained the outlet how he wanted the new movie to feel completely fresh and different from 2019’s Knives Out:
“I wanted to establish right off the bat that every single [‘Knives Out’ movie] is going to be a very different animal. Each one of them must have its own reason for being and its own theme. It’s not just repeating a formula, but using this genre to create a whole new formula every time. Sometimes with series or sequels, it can become weird, stratified, fossilized from the previous movies. The fun thing to me is genuinely creating something fresh and new.
If Daniel and I are going to keep making these, we don’t want to just spin our wheels. We want to be as jazzed and excited and terrified whether or not it’s going to work every single time.”
Johnson also explained his writing process for Glass Onion:
“I wrote the movie during lockdown in 2020, so wanting to be on the beach influenced it more than anything. But the setting was almost window dressing. The place it all started was the story and figuring out the narrative gambit that’s at the heart of this movie.”
GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY (2022) Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc. Cr: Courtesy NETFLIX
In Knives Out, we walked out of the movie not really having a full picture of who our lead character, Benoit Blanc, really was. And that was very much intentional and within the standards of the genre, as Johnson explained:
“I underwrote the character. I tried to keep any big, obvious quirks out, [hoping] that the character would fill out with the actor.
It’s a mistake of the genre to think that your detective is your main character. Benoit Blanc is the constant North Star of all of these movies. But you have to think of him as the detective, not as the central character. The story has to function in terms of the suspects, the murder, and the victim. Benoit is weaving his way through that, but the dramatic stakes are never his.”
Daniel Craig, who plays Blanc, added that he’s a fan of that aspect of the character:
“I like the ambiguity of the character. I like leaving him a little bit up for people to guess about.
He loves strangers. The chance to go somewhere as amazing as Greece on this job is as good as it gets for him. I try to play him as unjudgmental as possible. He has to be open so people want to open up to him. He wants to disarm people — and to alienate people with his smarts goes against his technique.”
The sequel will introduce an entirely new ensemble. We start with Edward Norton as Miles Bron, a tech billionaire who invites some of his college friends to his private island in Greece for a weekend. The group, referred to as “The Disrupters”, includes Bron’s ex-business partner Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe), who may have a few secrets of her own, Kathryn Hahn as Claire Debella, a Connecticut governor running for Senate, Kate Hudson as ex-model Birdie Jay, Leslie Odom Jr. as Lionel Toussaint, a scientist that works on Bron’s company, Dave Bautista as YouTube star Duke Cody, Madelyn Cline playing his younger girlfriend and channel assistant Whiskey, and Jessica Henwick, who plays Birdie’s assistant Peg.
Hudson said the following about Rian Johnson’s writing:
“Rian creates characters that are terrible people. They do terrible things all the time, and it’s delicious to watch. As an actor, when you get to play things so far removed from who you are, this is what we love to do.”
Hahn added:
“Rian doesn’t just pick people who are right for the parts. He picks people who are right for the ensemble. It feels egoless — everyone is on the same playing field.”
Norton also agrees with the sentiment:
“Everyone was a little giddy with the fun of it. It’s partly because Rian’s written about old friends getting together, and there’s a lot of exuberance within the story. But you can feel that a lot of fun has gone into making it.”
Leslie Odom Jr. also explained the cast dynamics as unique in his career:
“This was the first movie I’ve done where people weren’t running off to their own trailer to get time away. We’d show up at the beginning of the day. We’d play some chess, play some music. We were there for the hang.”
Bautista shared some insight into Daniel Craig’s persona on set when comparing him to the time they also shared screentime, in 2015’s Spectre:
“He was really put through it on Bond, and you could feel that he was under a lot of pressure. He didn’t seem like the happiest person on Bond, but on Glass Onion it was the complete opposite. He was so much fun and always smiling and happy.”
Jessica Henwick told Entertainment Weekly the following about her character and how she progressed from the page to the screen:
“In the original script, she’s not written as someone who doesn’t like her job. Of all the characters, she was the blank slate. And I went in, and I was like, ‘This is not going to be interesting if this is a woman who enjoys this job. This is probably someone who’s tried to quit three or four times, and she can’t bring herself to do it.’ I thought, ‘Let’s make this more than just an assistant and employee relationship. It’s like a toxic love/hate dynamic between the two of them.’ Peg despises working for Birdie, but Birdie can’t live without her. And Peg knows that. And Peg loves her. We’ll go from arguing in one scene, and then the next scene we’re drunk and my head is in her lap. That sums it up for me.”
Cline, the youngest member of the group, said:
“It’s playing it as if it’s the second time around somebody has watched it. The way you play it could have multiple meanings — it was finding those choices I could make with my character that could potentially be taken multiple ways. It’s the ability to play innocent and guilty at the same time.”
Additionally, in an interview with Total Film Magazine, Johnson explained that he thought for a bit about doing something else before jumping into Benoit Blanc again, but he simply was having so much fun with the character and the genre:
“I had for a while thought that maybe I should do something else first. But the God’s honest truth is, I had so much fun making this one, and the creative challenge of figuring out a third movie that’s completely different from both this one and the first one – right now, that’s the most interesting creative challenge to me. So I might just dive in and see what we come up with.”
He also iterated that he will be making these movies for as long as he and Daniel Craig are able to:
“As long as the two of us are still having fun, and as long as we can continue to make these truly new experiences each time, and find new ways to challenge ourselves… The second we feel like we’re repeating ourselves, or just turning a crank on a machine, we’ll stop. Because to me, the whole conception of this whole series is the same way Agatha Christie did it with her books – we’re doing something new and surprising every time.”
Here is the new trailer:
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery will hit theaters (for a limited time) on November 23 and Netflix on December 23.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
