[The following contains light spoilers for Knives Out sequel Glass Onion.]
Janelle Monáe is, effectively, the second lead of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out sequel Glass Onion. If you want to be a little reductive about it, it’s the same kind of role that Ana de Armas played in the first movie, sort of a “regular person” who plays off of the over-the-top cartoon person that Daniel Craig is playing when he puts on the ridiculous accent of gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc. And at the risk of saying too much, she is important to the plot of the movie (to be fair, everyone in the ensemble cast is, to some extent, important to the plot of the movie… it is a whodunnit, after all), but it sounds like everything about making Glass Onion to Monáe was just a bonus to actually getting to be in Glass Onion.
Speaking with Austin Butler as part of Variety’s ongoing “Actors On Actors” feature, Monáe said that she saw Knives Out and was just “so excited” to see someone making a movie that you could see with your family where “you didn’t leave heavy”—you just got to solve a murder mystery. So she said yes to Glass Onion simply because it meant working with Johnson on another movie like Knives Out. But, as she told Butler, her reaction went from “yes” to “Hell yes” after reading the script, and then from “Hell yes” to “F yes” when she found out that they’d be filming in Greece. She said that, with the pandemic going on and a lot of things getting canceled, it was “a dream come true” to get the offer.
We’ll have to dance around this next bit to avoid spoilers (avoid the full article if you want to avoid all spoilers), but Monáe added that she had to keep multiple notebooks to track her Glass Onion character while filming, and one thing she appreciated was having a chance to play with her character’s accent and to use that as a way to make people sympathize with her, saying, “You’re like, ‘Oh, I want her to win. I love her. I want to hug her.’”
Elsewhere in the chat, Butler sheepishly admitted that one of the few times he ever danced in public before making Elvis was when he saw Monáe at Coachella, which is cute, even if he says he’s ashamed of the fact that he went to Coachella.
