How Daniel Craig has evolved detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out series
Benoit Blanc, the detective with the ‘Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl’ played by Daniel Craig, is the beating heart of the film series
The greatest mystery in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films might be Benoit Blanc.
Over the course of three films, Johnson and Daniel Craig have stingily dropped clues to Blanc’s past and personal life. Since Blanc introduced himself in Knives Out as “a respectful, quiet, passive observer … of the truth”, following the breadcrumbs has been a sport of its own.
There are, for instance, the vague, offhand references to cases he has cracked before: something with a tennis champion, another with a ballet dancer and, in the latest chapter, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, we hear about something dastardly at the Kentucky Derby that he solved.
Blanc has been profiled in The New Yorker and was a guest on The View. He appears to live with Hugh Grant. He dislikes the board game Clue.
In Wake Up Dead Man, which is showing at cinemas and will stream on Netflix on December 12, Blanc takes up the case of a priest (Josh Brolin) who dies mysteriously in the middle of a church service.
Of the film’s many delights – among them, Josh O’Connor’s co-leading performance as a priest under suspicion and a cast of parishioners including Andrew Scott, Jeremy Renner and Glenn Close – is seeing Craig continue to find new little wrinkles to Blanc.