Glenn Close and Kerry Washington are the latest names to join the cast of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
The third instalment in the Knives Out series – following 2022’s was confirmed last week and will go into production next month. The film is slated for a 2025 release.
The news follows the announcement of Andrew Scott joining the cast alongside Josh O’Connor (Challengers) and Caile Spaeny (Priscilla), and Daniel Craig, who played the shrewd and eccentric detective Benoit Blanc in the 2019 film and its first sequel, 2023’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
Rian Johnson will once again return as writer and director. Plot details are yet to be revealed but in a teaser shared by Johnson last Friday (May 24), narration by Craig’s Blanc states the film will feature its “most dangerous case yet”.
The next Benoit Blanc mystery, the follow-up to Knives Out and Glass Onion, is called Wake Up Dead Man. pic.twitter.com/pdDXRDmwcI
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) May 24, 2024
“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 threequel’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.”
Close has several movies in post-production, including Lee Daniel’s supernatural thriller The Deliverance and the action comedy Back in Action, which marks Cameron Diaz’s first film in a decade. Both will arrive on Netflix.
Meanwhile, Washington is starring in the series Unprisoned and will play the lead the Tyler Perry-helmed World War II feature Six Triple Eight for Netflix.
He continued: “We’re about to go into production on the 3rd one, and I’m very, very excited to share the title, which gives a little hint of where it’s going.”
Back in 2022, Johnson said that he will “keep making” more sequels of the whodunnit film as long Craig is on board.