“I feel like we’ve caught a nice wave of people re-discovering the joys of the genre”: The cast and director of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery at the London Film Festival 2022 press conference

The first we see of Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective, in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – the triumphant, standalone sequel to 2019’s equally conquering Knives Out – he is in the doldrums between cases. Filling the void, he indulges in a game of Among Us in a sequence which features beautiful, funny, posthumous cameos of timely poignancy from Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim. Blanc is counterintuitively terrible at the game, but the brief scene serves a layered, textual purpose. In a film which brings the crime fiction format championed by Agatha Christie into a setting occupied by tech billionaires and Twitterisms, the sequence represents the endurance of the whodunnit as a central facet of popular culture. Among Us, in an albeit very different way, sits aside the Knives Out franchise as contemporary proof of this endurance.

The Upcoming had the pleasure of attending a press conference at the London Film Festival 2022 ahead of the Glass Onion premiere, hosted by Robbie Collin. Director Rian Johnson spoke of his affection for the genre and his subversions of it. He also reminisced on the experience of filming Lansbury and Sondheim’s characters, and expressed warm sentiments to their legacies, thoughts echoed by Craig, also in attendance. Sharing the panel with Johnson and Craig were cast members Dave Bautista, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr and Jessica Henwick. Completing the panel was producer Ram Bergman.

Catch more brilliant highlights from the press conference below.

Matthew McMillan

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is released nationwide on 23^rd November 2022 and available on Netflix on 23^rd December 2022.

Read our review of the film here.

Read more reviews and interviews from our London Film Festival 2022 coverage here.

For further information about the festival visit the official BFI website here.

Watch the trailer for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery here: