Knives Out Director Rian Johnson Expresses Frustration With Sequel, Confirms Brand-New Cast to Join Daniel Craig

Knives Out became a beloved part of the cultural zeitgeist when it first debuted last fall, with its star-studded cast and its unique approach to the tropes of the mystery genre. The Oscar-nominated film quickly became a hit, with a sequel being announced just a matter of months later. Fans have been eager to see what Knives Out‘s sequel will bring — and it sounds like that endless possibility has been posing an interesting challenge to writer-director Rian Johnson. In a recent conversation in Interview Magazine with The Devil All the Time director Antonio Campos, Johnson revealed the creative struggles that have come with crafting the follow-up, while also clarifying that it technically isn’t a “Knives Out sequel”.

“I’m actually writing another Knives Out,” Johnson explained. “It’s been such a mindf-ck, because I sat on the idea for the first one for 10 years. And with this one, I’m starting with a blank page. It’s not really a Knives Out sequel. I need to come up with a title for it so I can stop calling it The Knives Out Sequel because it’s just Daniel Craig as the same detective with a totally new cast.”

Johnson has previously expressed the fact that the Knives Out follow-up will largely follow an entirely different cast, with the exception of Craig’s Benoit Blanc. So fans hoping for the return of characters like Ransom Drysdale (Chris Evans) and Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) might be out of luck.

“Think of it like another Hercule Poirot novel from Agatha Christie,” Johnson previously explained. “So, whole new location, whole new cast. Does that cancel out all your questions?”

“In my mind, I don’t even think of it in terms of like a sequel,” Johnson said previously. “Ever since we started working on this I was like, look, if we can keep this going, the same way Agatha Christie wrote a bunch of Poirot novels. I mean, do that with Blanc and keep making more mysteries. Whole new cast, whole new location, whole new mystery. It’s just another Benoit Blanc mystery and it seems like there’s just so many different things you can do with it, you know? It seems like it’d be really fun.”

Are you excited to see the follow-up to Knives Out? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!