Josh O’Connor and Cailee Spaeny join Daniel Craig in Knives Out 3
Josh O’Connor and Cailee Spaeny have both joined the cast of Knives Out 3 (Getty Images)
Challengers star Josh O’Connor and Priscilla‘s Cailee Spaeny have joined Daniel Craig in Knives Out 3, titled Wake Up Dead Man.
The third film to feature Daniel Craig as the hilariously southern greatest detective of all time, Benoit Blanc, has already started to fill out its ranks with stars, just days after the title of the feature was announced as: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
Following on from Knives Out (2019), which featured Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collete and Ana De Armas, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), which saw Janelle Monáe do double duty alongside Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson and Kathryn Hahn, Benoit Blanc will return in 2025 – and two of the zeitgeist’s most prolific stars will join him.
As reported by Deadline today (and confirmed via repost by director and writer Rian Johnson), Josh O’Connor and Cailee Spaeny, who have both blitzed the box office in recent months with Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and A24’s Civil War, respectively, are the first big names to join the flick.
Johnson co-wrote the script with his partner Ram Bergman. The pair will both produce through T-Street Productions.
No plot details are available as of yet, but a Netflix teaser has called the film Blanc’s “most dangerous case yet”, and will be released in 2025.
O’Connor, whose breakout role was queer romance film God’s Own Country, has a stacked roster in the coming years; he is slated to next appear opposite Paul Mescal in gay war drama The History of Sound.
Spaeny, who recently portrayed Elvis Presley’s titular wife in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, will next appear in Alien sort-of-prequel Alien: Romulus.
Though Janelle Monáe, who stole the show in Glass Onion, hinted that she’d be up for a return in Knives Out 3, the remainder of the cast has yet to be announced – but fans are hoping that Blanc’s long-suffering partner, played by Hugh Grant, will make a return.
Elsewhere for former James Bond actor Craig, early reactions from Cannes Film Festival have suggested that his turn in Queer, also directed by Guadagnino, is his best performance yet.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will be released on Netflix in 2025.
