Though it started its life as one of 2022’s new movie releases, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery has carried over into 2023 as a must-see event. Continuing to build a franchise around Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, writer/director Rian Johnson’s gentleman detective continues to win over new fans with his quirky and deductive adventures.
It’s a result that achieved the intended endgame, which is even more of a triumph after Johnson admitted that he made a huge mistake in the early phases of development. Admitting his big faux pas to Queue while promoting his Knives Out follow-up, Rian Johnson admitted his own humanity as he went through the following process, and correction, to create his iconic sleuth:
Oh God, no. I wrote the character in a vacuum. Basically, when I started writing the Benoit Blanc character, I screwed myself up because I started thinking that I wanted to create a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes, so I started loading him up with all these quirks, and he just became ridiculous. Finally, I said, I’m not going to try and create a character on the page beyond what his actions are in the mystery.
Fans of the whodunnit genre could probably relate to Johnson’s woes when creating Benoit Blanc. To see the creation of a new detective that can stand up to the mythic legacies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie’s landmark creations is simultaneously welcomed, but also rather rare. It's a truth that's even more applicable when both of those author's creations are still very much in operation.
Even in Kenneth Branagh’s current run Poirot films, new additions to Poirot’s backstory have been employed to freshen up adaptations like last year’s Death on the Nile. Meanwhile, Glass Onion doesn’t exactly have that sort of foundation to build off of. It's liberating because a creator can do whatever they want, but it's also scary because no one ever wants to create a mere knockoff of a character everyone already loves.
Starting out with as simple of a brief as the one described above, Knives Out had a pretty wide open canvas to use when crafting Benoit’s colorful personality. In fact, there was only one real specification that came into play when Rian Johnson was writing the character, and it’s probably what you would have expected:
So the only thing I gave him was, I think I called it a ‘light Southern drawl.’ Then I just wrote to his function in the story, and thought, When I find whoever’s going to play this, then we’ll work together and we’ll create the character. It wasn’t like we changed the dialogue or changed the script or anything — just Daniel inhabiting that role and bringing his vibe to it instantly brought it to life. No eye patch required, thank God.
It’s not quite the scenario that saw Craig helping shape his James Bond in the absence of a finished script for Quantum of Solace, but lending his performing powers to Benoit’s development sounds like it still had a huge impression on the finished character. All it took for Daniel Craig and Rian Johnson to make Benoit Blanc a memorable addition to the canon of deductive minds was an exaggerated accent, and a creative approach.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery continued to use this model to great effect, as more of Blanc’s personality has been revealed in a naturalistic manner. Rian Johnson doesn’t try to make the backstory of Benoit Blanc a big deal, and that in turn makes returning to the character easier. It certainly hasn’t robbed the writer/director of his passion for the character, as what’s still being called Knives Out 3 is Johnson’s current priority.
Audiences aren’t tired of Benoit Blanc either, as seen with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’s huge Netflix debut and a rather successful, if too short, theatrical release. If you’re looking to walk through this latest maze of intrigue and quirky comedy, your Netflix subscription is the first clue that’ll lead you into the next mystery.
