In 2019’s “Knives Out,” Detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, had to sift through a string of dead-ends and red herrings to investigate the death of a famous crime novelist after he celebrates his 85th birthday. /PDI
Part of the titillation of screen whodunits is figuring out the relationships fueling the group dynamic that exists among the “suspects.” For that reason, we’ll avoid discussing too much of the details here. Suffice it to say that in this installment, Benoit “gatecrashes” a private get-together arranged by tech billionaire Miles Bron . The quirky entrepreneur has flown his friends and colleagues to a secluded island in Greece to play a game and solve a mystery.
“But the mode in which we were thinking to keep making them was always not to continue the story of the first one, but to treat them the way Agatha Christie treated her books … to do an entirely new mystery every time, with a new location and a new rogues’ gallery of characters. “It’s as simple as getting the best actors you can possibly get,” he quipped. “I mean, my head spins when I think about the fact that we were able to get this group together. We know we’re going to be on location and we’ll all be stuck together for a while. So, you have to cast cool people who are hopefully going to get along and have a good time.”
“There were so many shots where the camera was on one person, but if you turned it around, you’ll see the rest of us all crowded around behind the camera [rooting for the one in front of it]! It was pretty remarkable and hilarious!” Asked if he felt like he had license to go to some extreme fun places with his character, Edward said, “I mean, when someone like Rian calls and says, ‘I’m basically going to run a summer camp for deeply unserious people, and I need people who are willing to ham it up,’ [you don’t say no].
“But there’s a funny irony to making films or doing theater, which is really made up of a bunch of adults playing dress up and pretending to be other people .