Are you ready for Benoit Blanc’s most dangerous case yet? Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is the third film featuring the Southern-fried detective, brought to life by Daniel Craig and created by writer-director Rian Johnson.
Scroll to read everything to know about Wake Up Dead Man, now streaming on Netflix.
This time around, Blanc travels to a small church in upstate New York where a murder that defies all logic sets the detective on his most personal case to date. After getting in trouble for punching a deacon, eager young priest Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) is sent to assist Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. Soon, the two men of the cloth clash — in part due to their vastly different ideas about faith — and when Wicks turns up dead during his Good Friday service, everyone in the town suspects Jud. Chief of police Geraldine Scott turns to Blanc for help, but even the world’s greatest detective struggles to make heads or tails of this seemingly impossible crime. Read more about the mystifying case here.
As happened in Knives Out and Glass Onion, Craig’s Blanc is joined by a robust — and all-new — cast of suspects in Wake Up Dead Man. In the past, Johnson has described his casting approach as akin to “throwing a dinner party.” Wake Up Dead Man is no different: “We’ve been very lucky with each of these movies to have gathered some of my favorite actors on the planet, and that’s absolutely the case here,” Johnson tells Tudum. “They’re also all lovely folks who get along, which is the dinner party aspect of it. When you’re making an ensemble movie like this, I think that’s key.”
This particular dinner party includes the following:
You may recall that Jeremy Renner’s “Renning Hot” habanero chili pepper sauce played a prominent role in Glass Onion. However, this time, Renner himself will appear — and not just on a hot sauce label. “Jeremy’s a great actor who I’ve wanted to work with for a long time,” Johnson says. “I was very relieved he thought the hot sauce thing was funny! He’s playing a proper part in this one.”
Read more about the Wake Up Dead Man’s murders’ row of actors on Tudum.
Just as each Benoit Blanc mystery boasts a carefully selected all-star cast, each has become known for their pitch-perfect cameos. Johnson’s longtime friend and collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt has appeared in all three films: In Knives Out, he voices a detective in a TV show playing in the background of Ana de Armas’s character’s house. In Glass Onion, the actor had his most covert cameo: The booming tone that Edward Norton’s character’s villa played every hour was actually a recording of Gordon-Levitt saying “dong” that was turned into a musical tone. In Wake Up Dead Man, Gordon-Levitt voices a sports announcer who narrates a baseball game.
Noah Segan has also had a cameo in each film, but in the flesh. In Knives Out, he played Trooper Wagner, a goofy, whodunnit-reading, Hamilton-loving cop. In Glass Onion, Segan was Derol, an oblivious stoner and Corona-slinging hanger-on who wanders through the action at inopportune moments. In Wake Up Dead Man, Segan returns with a distinctive goatee as Nikolai, who runs the pizzeria and bar Il Diavolo.
Wake Up Dead Man introduces some faces that are new to the franchise: Jeffrey Wright plays a Bishop who sends Father Jud up to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in reprimand. Annie Hamilton plays Grace Wicks, Monsignor Wicks’s misunderstood mother, around whom the central drama revolves. Lastly, Bridget Everett plays Louise, the woman on the other side of a crucial phone call Jud makes to a construction company.
Knives Out drew its name from a Radiohead song, while Glass Onion drew its titular inspiration from the Beatles’ song. So, where does the title of this third Benoit Blanc mystery spring from?
As it turns out, Wake Up Dead Man shares its title with a 1997 U2 song off their album Pop. “Pop is a very underrated album, and that song is very right for the title,” Johnson tells us.
“But I’ve had ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ in my head for a long while, and I first heard the phrase in American folk music,” the director adds. “There’s a line in this old folk song, which I first heard sung by Pete Seeger, but I think he learned it from Lead Belly. ‘Go down, Old Hannah.’ (Hannah is the sun.) It’s a working man just begging for that sun to go down so that his work day will be over. At some point in one of the verses, he says, ‘Wake up, old dead man.’ I’ve always thought that would be a great title for a creepy murder mystery.”
Johnson is a longtime fan of the genre, in large part because of how varied it is. “One of the things that’s fun for us about making these movies is that the murder mystery genre, as I experienced it growing up, is so diverse,” says the writer-director. “Every time we make one of these films, it’s fun to think, ‘How can this one explore a whole different corner of this genre?’ Knives Out was a cozy, family-mansion mystery. Glass Onion was a big, broad vacation movie — like Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun, or Death on the Nile. Wake Up Dead Man is closer to Knives Out, but even creepier than that.”
With Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson takes inspiration from John Dickson Carr and the locked-door mystery trope. “It’s a side alley of the whodunnit genre: the impossible crime. In the most literal sense, this is exactly what it sounds like. Usually, they involve some combination of ingenious contraption and manipulated timeline,” he says. “It’s the mystery equivalent of a Margherita pizza — possibly the purest test of a pizza artisan’s skill in that its simplicity leaves nothing to hide behind.”
Produced by Johnson and Ram Bergman through their company T-Street, the third Benoit Blanc mystery was filmed in London and wrapped during the summer of 2024.
Grab your trench coat and do a Hail Mary: Wake Up Dead Man is now streaming on Netflix.
Starting on Nov. 26, the film screened in select theaters. Before then, Johnson and the stacked cast feted the mystery at the Toronto Film Festival, where the film made its world premiere, and at the London Film Festival, where it made its international premiere. Check out an image from TIFF below.
