Jessica Henwick accidentally dropped a glass sculpture in Glass Onion — and it made the final cut
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Call it a happy accident.
In Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the climax kicks off with a moment that feels almost inevitable (writer-director Rian Johnson even calls it "Chekhov's glass bauble" in a play on the theatrical conceit of Chekhov's gun). Throughout the movie, we see the treasures of Miles Bron's (Edward Norton) collection, including a dizzying array of glass sculptures.
When Andi, er, Helen (Janelle Monáe) can't take the indignities she's suffered anymore, she grabs one of Bron's artworks and throws it to the ground, relishing the way it shatters. Soon, the other guests join her in the shattering melee until every last piece has been destroyed.
But filming one of those moments didn't go exactly as planned. We see Peg (Jessica Henwick) drop a giant wheel sculpture, then give the camera a look of chagrined shock. That expression is Henwick's genuine reaction to dropping the prop by mistake, a moment Johnson happened to catch on camera.
"One of my favorite moments was Jess had a massive one that she got to smash, and she was so excited," Johnson tells EW. "It's a massive wheel of glass. We start rolling the camera, and I'm saying to her, 'Okay, we want to get this exactly right. We only have one of these. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to say one, two, three.' She drops it and then looks right into the camera and does this [makes a shocked face]. We had started the camera just to practice the thing. She broke it and then looked right in the camera. That's the take that's in the movie."
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Henwick, however, doesn't find the memory quite as amusing. "I broke into a cold sweat," she says. "I still have nightmares about that moment."
Leslie Odom Jr., who stars as scientist Lionel Toussaint, says the cast was as eager to break the glass as audiences will be to see it broken. "We knew that that moment was coming, so everybody had picked their one [piece]," he says. "I'm going to break that one."
Setting Henwick's hiccup aside, shooting that sequence seems to have been everyone's favorite scene, particularly Monáe, who was tasked with a lot of the film's heavier dramatic moments. "I had so much fun that day," she says. "I pulled from all of my favorite characters like Riddler and the Joker. I only had two takes to do all of that because once you break that glass, it takes a lot to clean up. I had to really map out everything in my head and make sure that I was getting a different variety of smashing. There's the big, big moment. How do you lead up to that? How do you keep the audience engaged as you're breaking all these things?"
Johnson says all of the sculptures were custom-made near Prague out of sugar glass, which breaks very easily and is not sharp when it shatters. The sculptures are largely Easter eggs, particularly to Beatles lyrics, including a strawberry in reference to "Strawberry Fields."
Though it turns out that Henwick filched said strawberry for herself when production ended. "I have a sugar glass strawberry at home," she confesses to Johnson. "I wrapped it in bubble wrap, and I carried it in my bag onto the plane."
Glass Onion is now on Netflix, so you can try to pinpoint all the Beatles references in Miles Bron's mansion.
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