Daniel Craig Might Have Found His Most Iconic Character Yet with Knives Out

You probably associate Daniel Craig with fast cars, dead exes, and very sore testicles. But the longest-running Bond actor’s latest film may change all that.

This weekend brings Knives Out, an original Agatha Christie-style murder mystery from The Last Jedi captain Rian Johnson. It’s an ensemble full of big name actors—Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, and more—giving Very Big Performances (think modern Clue characters). But as a private detective hired to crack the case of the Thrombey family’s deceased novelist patriarch Harlan (Christopher Plummer), Craig is both the film’s motor and its gold-plated rims.

That means Craig’s detective guides us through the twisting mystery. And it also means that Craig’s detective goes by Benoit Blanc, he has what one character calls a “Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl,” and he makes literary references that he himself doesn't quite understand (“I anticipate the terminus of Gravity’s Rainbow,” he says, later admitting he hasn’t read Gravity’s Rainbow). In short, he steals the show.

We’re introduced to Blanc as members of the Thrombey family—all of whom were together the night Harlan was killed—are questioned by a couple of local police detectives (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan). Blanc, reclining ten feet behind the officers, taps a piano’s high-pitched keys according to what the deposed say (“...right,” Stanfield responds). We’re told that Blanc’s “a private investigator of great renown” and that he’s been profiled by The New Yorker (Headline: “The Last of the Gentlemen Sleuths”). And yet, we see him caught unaware at a crucial moment because, with headphones on and music blaring, he’s singing along to Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind.” How exactly such an unintentional oddball is such a great detective is its own mystery.

Another mystery is how Craig arrived at playing such an oddball. When he hosted Saturday Night Live in 2012, Vulture’s critic wrote that Craig’s “limited comedic ability was hard to disguise.” At the time, he’d already flashed bits of Bond wit (“I’ve got a little itch, down there. Would you mind?”), but was best known for his abs and smolder. But in recent years, Craig’s been moving away from the stone-faced superspy and similarly serious roles (Defiance, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). After his most recent bout as Bond, in fact, the actor famously said, “I’d rather slash my wrists” than play 007 again. And though he will indeed take the Aston Martin for one last spin in next year’s No Time to Die, lately, he’s been lightening up. In 2015, he had “one of the standout comedy moments” in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as a stormtrooper who falls victim to Rey’s Jedi mind tricks. In 2017, he lent his voice to the Romanian satire series Comrade Detective. And more notably, in that same year’s Logan Lucky, he played a sort of Southern cousin to Blanc: the bleach-haired West Virginia explosives enthusiast Joe Bang.

There’s a sheer out of far, far left field quality to Craig’s Southern performances. His accents are outrageous (Benoit Blanc is pure Shelby Foote)—bad in the best way. And his characters are, in many ways, the anti-Bonds: exuberant, eccentric, extremely American. But whereas Craig detonates a few Logan Lucky scenes as Joe Bang, Knives Out is one extended fireworks display.

Dressed like a young John Huston, and always with a long cigar in hand, there’s a lore around “the great Benoit Blanc.” There’s talk within the movie of the New Yorker profile, but there’s also his specific affectations and techniques. He has a habit of unexpectedly emerging from dark corners. Without explanation, he often flips a coin. He thinks through metaphor, becoming fixated on the idea of a donut (“a case with a hole in the middle”). And he has a method that he claims “unerringly arrives at the truth.”

Which is ultimately what Blanc, as a hero, represents. Johnson has been working on Knives Out for a decade, but somewhere along the way his whodunnit became one for and of the Trump era. Each member of the Thrombey family is a different modern rich, white type: the teenage alt right troll (Jaeden Martell), the shallow wellness influencer (Toni Collette), the ne'er-do-well playboy (Evans). Each of them is born on third base, but thinks they hit a triple (they each think they’re “self-made”). Blanc is ostensibly there to solve the case of how Harlan died; really, he’s there to expose the myths and misdeeds of the one percent, and to defend Harlan’s hard working immigrant caretaker (Ana de Armas).

Though Knives Out is pitched to this moment, Johnson has hinted that if the film’s a success he’d like to make sequels centered around Benoit Blanc. “I’ve never really been interested in doing sequels, but this, the idea of doing more of these with Daniel as his character, is not sequels,” he told Uproxx. “It’s just what Agatha Christie did. It’s just coming up with a whole new mystery, a whole new location, all new cast, whole new mechanics of the appeal of a mystery and everything.”

And while Knives Out hasn’t officially been released yet, all evidence points towards Johnson getting that chance. The film has been getting raves from critics (it’s got a 97% tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes). Chance the Rapper liked it almost as much as The Lion King (and he LOVES The Lion King). And it’s eyeing a Baby Driver-level opening. Personally, I’ve seen better movies this year, but there’s no movie I’d more universally recommend.

So sure, there are a lot of ifs. But with Knives, Johnson and Craig both have a chance to swerve from the preexisting IP to which they’ve long been attached, to a new, original series. If Knives sequels do transpire, I suspect that at the terminus of Daniel Craig’s rainbow there will be a character he’s better known for than Bond. Enter Blanc, Benoit Blanc.

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Originally Appeared on GQ