Rian Johnson reveals how ‘Glass Onion’ landed a cameo from a legendary whodunnit icon

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the opening of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.

Glass Onion, the much-anticipated follow-up to 2019’s Knives Out, promises to be a worthy sequel to the aforementioned mystery movie, with it no doubt set to deliver many fun twists and turns that’ll keep audiences glued to Benoit Blanc’s latest case. On top of the plot developments, though, the film is also set to feature a few surprise cameos that will delight whodunnit aficionados, as a bonafide legend of the genre turns up for an unexpected part in proceedings.

We Got This Covered attended a screening of the sequel at this week’s Austin Film Festival and quizzed director Rian Johnson on how he got to pull off a star-studded scene early in the movie’s runtime. Only read on if you don’t mind learning the details of this moderate-level spoiler…

Glass Onion‘s opening sees Daniel Craig’s Southern-accented sleuth on a Zoom call with a host of familiar faces, including Natasha Lyonne, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and two icons who we sadly lost over the past year—musical maestro Stephen Sondheim and beloved star of stage and screen Angela Lansbury, perhaps best known as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

Johnson revealed to WGTC that the Zoom call nature of the sequence meant that he was able to cast his net wide when it came to landing some dream cameos, and Lansbury herself was just as “sweet” about the whole thing as you would expect, even if she didn’t fully understand the storyline. As he explained:

“Well, I think when we put in that opening Zoom, I had to just kind of [have] ‘oh, my God, could we ever?’ conversations and it was Lansbury and it was Sondheim and the fact that we were able to get them both in the movie, and she was so sweet… It will shock you to learn but she was so generous and so sweet and was just like, ‘I don’t even know what the hell this is, but if you talk me through it, I’m sure it would be great.’ And Stephen Sondheim also, I mean, for me, it’s incredible to me that we, even though it’s just a fun little moment, that we have both of them whose work has such a huge impact on this on the genre, the fact that we’ve got them in the movie, but also for me personally, just the fact that I got 10 minutes with each of them just to tell them what their work meant to me. That was really, really special.”

It’s not long now until we get to find out all the secrets contained in the many layers of Glass Onion, which opens on the big screen for a limited one-week theatrical run this Nov. 23 before streaming on Netflix from Dec. 23.