Wake Up Dead Man: Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig on Making a Sincere Story About Religious Faith Within A Knives Out Mystery

Danel Craig reunites with writer-director Rian Johnson for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment in their murder mystery-comedy franchise following Knives Out and Glass Onion.

In Wake Up Dead Man, the renowned (and always nattily attired) detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) investigates a seemingly impossible murder that has rocked a small upstate New York town. The prime suspect is a young Catholic priest, Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), the assistant to charismatic firebrand Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude.

Working with local police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), Blanc doubts that Father Jud, a former boxer who turned to the cloth after a tragedy in the ring, is the true killer, casting a wider net that includes parishioners Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), lawyer Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), aspiring politician Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), best-selling author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), and concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny).

Here’s what Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig recently told me about making Wake Up Dead Man and telling a sincere story about religious faith. (This interview has been edited for clarity.)

IGN: Rian, can you talk about the decision to write a story about faith and to write a character like Father Jud from that point of view? It’s not ironic, you’re not mocking faith.

Rian Johnson: I didn’t grow up Catholic, but I grew up Protestant and I grew up very, very Christian. It was something that was really personal to me. It was a big part. My relationship with Christ was a big part of my identity when I was growing up and up through my early twenties and I’m no longer a believer, but it’s something that I have a lot of very deep, complicated feelings about and it’s something that was a little bit scary, the notion of, and that’s what attracted us to it, I think.

The notion of actually having a real conversation about faith that wasn’t reductive or didactic, but was actually kind of talking about it in the context of a big, entertaining, fun, murder mystery, that’s really meant as a big tent thing for audiences to come and enjoy. That seemed like a great challenge.

I think for me, the reason I felt like I could even take that leap is because of my own personal grounding in it. That meant I really had skin in the game, in terms of wanting it to feel like it was, like I said, talking about that topic as opposed to talking at that topic, I guess.

IGN: Daniel, I think people might be surprised that, outside of the first shot of the movie, we don’t see Benoit Blanc for about an hour into the movie. What was your reaction when you read the script?

Daniel Craig: Feels like two hours.

Rian Johnson: That’s not about an hour. It’s the first act.

Daniel Craig: Listen, I make up for it. You get enough of me in the next two-thirds of the movie, so it’s all, it’s not a problem. I approach these things like I always do. I don’t want to read the script. I try and separate myself from the script when I read it because I want to read it with sort of outside eyes. Obviously, I read it looking at my part. Obviously I read it with Benoit in mind. But the film, the spine of the movie is the relationship between Father Jud and Benoit and we need to get to know him before Benoit can come in and start overacting.

IGN: I really did love that relationship between those two characters because one is a person driven by faith and then your character is obviously “just the facts”. Did you and Josh discuss the relationship much before you were filming?

Daniel Craig: I think the conversation was, I mean, in a way, Rian talks about (Benoit’s) background in a way, sort of put it there, that there was probably a very religious upbringing and that it was a response to that and then the move towards science and fact. And so as Rian said, it was really just important to make that an adult conversation and the joy of it being that there’s a revelation for Blanc in the story.

I mean we’re always trying to discuss it, figure it out, but there’s no one conversation I can think of. It’s one of many that you just sort of like, how about this? How about this? How about this? You’re just trying to throw as many ideas into it as possible.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery Photos

Rian Johnson: I think this was maybe my favorite part of this entire process. That first conversation between Blanc and Jud and the church, where they kind of really go head-to-head with their points-of-view. And this is an example of the type of collaboration that we have during it.

That was a scene that we actually dove into together, when it was still in the script phase, and Daniel had the incredibly perceptive instinct that I wrote it as a much softer scene between the two of them. And it was Daniel who was like, “I really think the harder you define these two, especially Blanc, the harder he comes in against faith, the more their kind of straight head-to-head in that first scene, the stronger their relationship will end up being.”

And he was so right and so it was going back and forth and figuring out how far can we push it in terms of how far Blanc goes? That for me is part of the pleasure of making movies with this guy. It really is. I don’t know. It is a joyful process of seeing how far we can push it and how we can make it the best it can be.

IGN: Daniel, Josh O’Connor is rumored to be up for the role of James Bond. What would you think of Josh as Bond?

Daniel Craig: I have to iron something out here. I started that rumor.

IGN: You started that rumor?

Rian Johnson: Maliciously. Maliciously.

Daniel Craig: Completely malicious. Let’s hope he is.

IGN: Oh my God. Awesome. Thank you so much guys and I loved the movie.

Daniel Craig: Thank you.

Rian Johnson: Thanks a lot.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will be in select theaters November 26 and premieres on Netflix December 12.

In his Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery review, IGN’s Carlos Morales deemed the film “a solid third entry for Benoit Blanc, finally delivering the classic-style mystery the series has sorely needed.”