With the murder mystery right around the corner, Daniel Craig shares how his James Bond experience prepared him for his Knives Out 2 return. An actor of about 30 years, Craig gained worldwide fame largely for his role as secret agent James Bond in Eon's movie franchise, beginning with Casino Royale and leading four other film installments, including his last in the role, No Time to Die. In addition to his Bond role, Craig has had roles in films like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Knives Out, for which he earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.
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Written, directed, and produced by Rian Johnson, the original Knives Out was a black comedy murder mystery film in which Craig starred as Benoit Blanc, a detective investigating the sudden death of a family patriarch. Released in the fall of 2019, the film received much critical acclaim and commercial success, with a sequel confirmed a few months later that would explore another investigation of Blanc's, with Craig signed on to reprise his character. Titled Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the first sequel to the original film will be released in December 2022, and follow a tech billionaire whose Greek getaway with his friends gets upended when turns up dead, resulting in Detective Benoit Blanc being put on the case.
Now, in an interview with Empire, Craig has sharing how his James Bond experience prepared him for his Knives Out 2 return as Benoit Blanc. After rhetorically asking how the Knives Out sequel cast and crew went about keeping an audience engaged in another installment—without simply imitating everything done in the first—Craig answered himself, sharing how his experience in the James Bond franchise has been of help and how with the right talent, one can achieve success with further installments. Read Craig's quote below:
I’ve spent the past 15 years of my life trying to do that in a franchise, so I’m not afraid of it. If you’ve got the right people in the room and the right talent, then you can do it. Rian’s a genius writer and doesn’t want to repeat [himself]. Neither do we want to let people down; we want audiences to enjoy the world that we created in the first one and believe in this one.
With Craig having starred in a successful franchise spanning about 15 years as James Bond, it's no joke that he definitely has experience with keeping audiences interested in multiple series installments. In recent years, multi-film series have largely taken up Craig's filmography, save for Steven Soderbergh's heist comedy Logan Lucky and the fact-based drama Kings in 2017. Perhaps Craig wants to become a master at starring in film series, continuously being able to defy expectations with fascinating stories and characters for years to come.
Though Knives Out 2 has yet to release, the film is set to be one of two sequels being produced by Netflix following the success of the original murder mystery comedy, with the door potentially open for more. With Johnson citing Agatha Christie as a major inspiration for his franchise, namely the Hercule Poirot novels, it seems possible Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery won't be the last of Johnson's films for Craig. In the meantime, audiences can look forward to Craig's Knives Out 2 return when it begins streaming on December 23.