Assembling the “Blatantly All-Star” Ensemble of Glass Onion

Rian Johnson, a lifelong student of the murder mystery, knows it’s a genre with very strict rules to adhere to. A structure-minded writer, he begins writing not so much with characters but with plot functions: the protagonist, the killer, the victim. There’s the detective too, of course, played in Johnson’s mystery films Knives Out and Glass Onion by Daniel Craig, but Johnson knows the rules for that character too: “It’s a weird thing with these movies because the detective is at the heart of it, but the detective is never the protagonist of the movie.”

But there’s another essential, less discussed element of the murder mystery, particularly one that’s a sequel to a smash hit: star power. Johnson knows that perfectly well too. “[They are] very blatantly all-star casts,” Johnson says of the movies that inspired him, which include the 1970s adaptations of Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, as well as 1973’s The Last of Sheila, cowritten by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim. “That’s kind of my emotional bedrock for what I’m trying to recreate with these things.”

He was also thinking of Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, about “old friends whose friendships have soured over the years,” when he started writing the pandemic-era escapist fantasy of Glass Onion, in which Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc crashes a reunion weekend on a private Greek island. Like Knives Out the film is built not just around its ingenious structure, but the thrill of a perfectly calibrated acting ensemble, whose roles may have been reverse-engineered to fit the story—“It sounds very clinical, but it’s just the way I’ve learned to work,” Johnson admits—but emerge as fully realized, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking characters all their own. 

Johnson says that a Knives Out movie doesn’t necessarily have to be about rich people—“it might actually be important with the next one to break from that.” But when trying to imagine how a reunion among friends might happen in the kind of sealed-off space that makes for a good murder mystery—a limited group of suspects, no escape—he found the perfect host in tech bro Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton). A rich man with an affinity for big ideas and ostentatious displays, he’s not not a stand-in for Elon Musk, Johnson says, but more importantly he functions as the center of his constellation of friends, who are all too eager to flout pandemic protocols (it’s set in May 2020) and escape to his luxe island retreat. His wealth is the catalyst for the story, but also the commentary that becomes clear as the film goes on. “It’s about culpability and about complicity and big lies out of self-interest,” Johnson says, remaining carefully spoiler-free. “There always has to be something that grounds it beyond just, you know, ‘Boo, rich people.’”

The people invited to Miles’s island have very clear financial stakes in the friendship—genius engineer Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr.) works for him, while politician Claire (Kathryn Hahn), fashion designer Birdie (Kate Hudson), and YouTuber Duke (Dave Bautista) have all accepted his money to further their careers. The one outlier is Andi (Janelle Monáe), Miles’s former business partner who’s recently been cut out of the company, and whose appearance at the island comes as a shock to seemingly everyone. 

Monáe’s role gets even more complex as the story unfolds, and maybe more emotional than what you’d expect in a murder-mystery romp. It was the ensemble surrounding her, and her director, that kept her grounded, as Monáe told VF’s David Canfield earlier this year. In one explosive scene, she said, “literally 60 seconds prior to filming, I’d be on the side laughing at Kate and Kathryn dancing behind Rian, as he was trying to get us to focus in on something.” She credits Johnson for maintaining that energy throughout the shoot. “That’s the type of director I want to be,” she said. “I want people to say, ‘When I showed up on set, the energy was just cool.’”