Rian Johnson has found success with different types of movies, from the neo-noir mystery Brick to Star Wars: The Last Jedi. However, more recently, his name has become synonymous with the murder mystery genre. Between the Knives Out series — the latest of which, Wake Up Dead Man, is set to hit the 2025 movie calendar in December — and Poker Face, Johnson has been a big part of repopularizing the genre, but it turns out the inspiration to do so had been bubbling for longer than we may have realized.
Knives Out was a hit when it was released in 2019, introducing audiences to Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective, with his Southern drawl and wonderfully flamboyant sense of style. It turns out ole Benny rented space in Rian Johnson’s head for some time before he made his debut six years ago. Ram Bergman, co-producer on the Knives Out films, told Variety the idea was born a full decade before the first movie’s release.
In fact, he said that Rian Johnson first mentioned the concept of doing a murder mystery with Benoit Blanc when he was on his first date with Karina Longworth, who he married in 2018.
It's really special that these movies were something that Rian Johnson and Karina Longworth talked about from the very beginning of their relationship and now — more than a decade later and after seven years of marriage — the Benoit Blanc mysteries have become such a phenomenon.
There’s also another pretty cool connection between Karina Longworth and Rian Johnson’s career in murder mysteries. Apparently we have her to thank for Poker Face, as Natasha Lyonne apparently met Johnson at one of Longworth’s book signings. According to SyFy, the Orange Is the New Black star said:
Karina and I were friends. And so Rian and I ended up sitting at a book signing of hers, and next thing I knew we were cooking up this idea. I think he’d seen Russian Doll, and I’m never very far from Peter Falk or Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye — I try to keep them close. Rian had this idea for doing this one-hour, and I remember us pitching, and the reaction was sort of like, ‘A procedural? Are you crazy?’ And what was so profound and moving to me is that he actually wrote it and sent it to me, and we actually made it.
So not only was Karina Longworth around for the birth of Benoit Blanc, but she was apparently instrumental in the creation of Charlie Cale.
Of course, the fate of the case-of-the-week series is up in the air right now, as Peacock canceled Poker Face after Season 2. However, Rian Johnson has confirmed that he’s shopping the series around, with Peter Dinklage possibly in talks to take over the role of the human bullshit detector.
Maybe Rian Johnson should get his wife to work some of her magic with the universe to make that happen, because I like her track record so far!
If you want to revisit Rian Johnson’s murder mystery work, Wake Up Dead Man hits theaters on Friday, December 12, while Knives Out can be streamed on Prime Video and Glass Onion on Netflix. Poker Face, meanwhile, is available on Peacock, so in order to get the best prices on all of these, be sure to check out our Black Friday streaming deals.
