Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc is back on the case, and there’s an all-new cast of suspects. Scandal alum Kerry Washington and Fatal Attraction and Guardians of the Galaxy star Glenn Close have joined writer-director Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment of Netflix’s popular whodunnit franchise, numerous outlets confirmed.
Washington – who reacted to the casting news by writing on X (formerly Twitter), “So excited to be apart of the Knives Out family.” – and Close join a star-studded cast that currently includes Fleabag actor Andrew Scott, Challengers star Josh O’Connor, and Priscilla star Cailee Spaeny. Character and plot details for the film haven’t yet been released, but Craig teased in a teaser trailer released on May 24 that it’s Blanc’s “most dangerous case yet,” with Netflix confirming on its Tudum site that “Blanc will be unravelling a brand-new murder mystery in an as-yet-undisclosed setting, surrounded by a new colorful cast of suspects.”
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“I love everything about whodunits, but one of the things I love most is how malleable the genre is,” Johnson wrote on social media before announcing the film’s title. “There’s a whole tonal spectrum from Carr to Christie, and getting to explore that range is one of the most exciting things about making Benoit Blanc movies.”
Penned and directed by Johnson, Knives Out released in 2019 and centered around Craig’s Blanc, a world-famous detective, as he investigated the death of renowned writer Harlan Thrombey. Blanc is brought in to investigate the possibility that “foul play” may have been involved. The film, which grossed $312 million against a $40 million budget, starred Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, and Jaeden Martell.
On the heels of the first film’s success, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, debuted in 2022. Bringing back Craig as Blanc as he investigated deaths connected to fictional tech billionaire Miles Bron, the movie starred Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista.
Production on Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is set to begin production in the UK in early June, per The Hollywood Reporter. Johnson is writing and directing the film, and also producing with his T-Street partner Ram Bergman, who worked on the first two films. Wake Up Dead Man is slated to release in 2025.
