Benoit Blanc is officially out. Glass Onion, the follow-up to the hit whodunit Knives Out, premieres in theaters today, and along with it audiences get their first glimpse at the master detective’s partner.
But why has Blanc come out? According to writer and director Rian Johnson, it was the perfect time to learn more about Blanc. “As I was developing the character, after a brief conversation with Daniel, it just seemed like a very natural fact about who Benoit was. We’re gonna get a glimpse of his home life, so it seemed like a good opportunity to kind of put that front and center,” he tells PRIDE.
Once Johnson had come to that realization about the character, he began getting excited about how he was going to share it with the audience. “I meant it to be very, very clear and plain that he’s a gay man, and we show his partner in the movie and a delightful, delightful cameo. I don’t even want to give away who the cameo is, because I think it’s very fun,” he teases. “I tried to think, who would I pick that would just bring me the most joy to think of Benoit Blanc being with and the very first person on my list was very gracious to come and play the part.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Benoit’s queerness is just one of the ways that the film reflects our current culture, which was a bit of a north star for Johnson, who — believe it or not — took those cues from Agatha Christie herself. “I think when we see whodunits these days, Christie adaptations are always period pieces set in some nostalgic version of England. And when Christie was writing, she was very much writing to her time and her moment,” he explains. “She wasn’t an incredibly political writer, but she was always engaging with the culture. And so [we’re] bringing that aspect of the whodunit back to life and engaging with the right here and now.”
It was this ethos of focusing on the here and now that helped inspire the film’s setting. “I sat down to write this in 2020 when the lockdown was happening. So that meant, ‘OK, we’re all going through this right now. That means we are going to acknowledge the pandemic in the movie. And that means all the stuff that’s on all of our minds right now, let’s put it right in there,” Johnson recalls.
Courtesy of Netflix
The same is true for the inspiration behind many of the film’s lovably unlikeable characters, which include everyone from a manosphere vlogger, to a politician, to a narcissistic, obnoxious billionaire. “It’s funny when I wrote it, I was like, ‘Oh, is this whole tech billionaire thing going to be so passe when this comes out? Is this going to be so dated?’ And unfortunately not,” he laughs.
While the film certainly hits on some very relevant and timely topics, it also has the timeless quality that’s made Christie’s novels the classics they remain today. They’re also potent sources of inspiration, particularly for Johnson when he was faced with the pressure of recapturing the magic of the first film, which felt like such a lightning-in-a-bottle moment. The key, he said, was to get back into the mindset of the first film.
“I tried to go back to the source of what got me excited about doing all this in the first place, which was Agatha Christie and my love of Agatha Christie’s books,” he shares. “I think a lot of people have the mistaken impression that she wrote the same book over and over, like, you know the body in the library and the stuffy Butler. Anyone who actually knows her work knows she was changing the game every single time. And she was surprising audiences, she was flipping the script with every new book.
Courtesy of Netflix
“Once I got it in my head — OK, I’m not trying to just continue the first one, or just do the first one again, I can really come at this and try and surprise myself and challenge myself with what the story can be — suddenly it went from being a pressure thing to being just joyful.”
That tactic has proven to be a solid one as, miraculously, Glass Onion both captures the cinematic joy of the first Knives Out film, with its twisting plot and charmingly villainous ensemble cast, but expands the world and enriches the Benoit Blanc character, making him one we can’t wait to follow into his next whodunit.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story premieres in theaters today and on Netflix December 23. Watch PRIDE’s full interview with Rian Johnson below.
