Key points
Rian Johnson explains how he drew from his Presbyterian background as a "youth group kid" to create Wake Up Dead Man.
For research, the filmmaker had dinner with six Catholic priests, which led to "one of the most critical scenes in the movie."
Johnson also says that he initially tried to fit another church into his latest Knives Out movie, but found "there just was not room for that."
Rian Johnsonhas faith in the faithless.
After exploring issues of class, wealth, and immigration in 2019'sKnives Outand its 2022 sequelGlass Onion, the filmmaker's third cinematic murder mystery turns his thematic focus toward a more personal subject: the American church.
Johnson's latest film,Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, sees Daniel Craig's Detective Benoit Blanc join forces with a Catholic priest named Jud (Josh O'Connor) to investigate a murder that shakes a small congregation in upstate New York to its core.
The filmmaker tellsEntertainment Weeklyhow his personal journey with Christianity shaped his latestKnives Outmystery.
"I grew up Presbyterian, Protestant, evangelical — a youth group kid, basically," he explains. "I was deeply personally Christian through my teenage years into my early twenties, and then later on in my twenties, I fell away from faith, and I'm no longer a Christian today."
Maya Dehlin Spach/WireImage
Johnson says that his cousin,Wake Up Dead Mancomposer Nathan Johsnon, had a similar faith trajectory. "As adults, we're both sort of unpacking the foundation that was laid — both the positive things and the negative things about it," he says.
Wake Up Dead Manreveals Blanc as a staunch, rational skeptic, but also largely frames Jud as a complex, empathetic community leader — a rare example of a heroic contemporary Christian in mainstream secular entertainment.
The filmmaker forced himself to adopt a faith-based headspace while writing O'Connor's character, who narrates a sizable chunk of the film. "I really had to put myself back to the place where I was seeing the world through the eyes that I had when I was a believer," he explains. "There's no way to honestly write Jud without genuinely putting myself back into a place of belief."
But Johnson's experience in a different branch of Christianity necessitated extra work. "Growing up Protestant, the Catholic church was a very exotic, kinda scary thing," he said. "And so once I made the decision to set this in the Catholic church, I had to do my research. And that was very interesting."
The filmmaker turned to Catholic family members to facilitate a discussion with a few clergymen. "I'm very close to my aunt and uncle that live in Denver," he says. "They invited their priest and five other local Denver priests over. So I got to sit down with them and have an ask-me-anything dinner. It was pretty amazing, and a lot came out of that."
Johnson recalls one particular takeaway from his sit-down with the priests. "It led to one of the most critical scenes in the movie, actually," he says. "I remember the priests telling me how when they go out during the day, they're always wearing the clerical color, even when just getting groceries. And that means that when they're just trying to get their grapefruit at the store, a woman will come up to them and start sobbing that her husband is dying, or somebody will come up to them and start getting in their face and screaming at them."
The filmmaker says that those revelations shaped a key scene in which Jud pauses his involvement in the investigation to attend to a parishioner in need. "The idea that they are on stage and of service to the world at all times as a priest, and there's no time off from that — that led directly to a pivotal scene halfway through the movie," Johnson says. "Jud is swept up in the gamified version of the murder mystery, and has kind of been led down Blanc's version of the us-against-them game. And he has a hard reset when something like that happens to him."
John Wilson/Netflix
Johnson didn't initially plan to set the film in a Catholic community and considered letting the action play out in a church more like the ones he had experienced in his youth. "I did briefly wonder about having it be set in the type of church I grew up going to, and maybe even having a youth group element to it," he says.
Once he decided against that, he still tried to find an avenue for a Protestant church to play a role in the story. "At some point in the different drafts of the first act, I had had kind of like a progressive Protestant church in town that the whole Catholic flock hated," Johnson recalls, laughing. "And they would bring flyers, really angry about the stuff that they were doing over there. But there just was not room for that."
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The filmmaker ultimately pivoted to a Catholic setting for aesthetic purposes. "Honestly, the big reason I chose the Catholic church — and this is kind of dumb, but also kind of pivotal — is that most of the churches I grew up going to kind of looked like Pottery Barns," he says. "They were just beige and looked like hotel lobbies."
He continues, "The movie, to a certain extent, is about storytelling. And nobody does beautiful visual storytelling like the Catholic church. And the symbolism of the Catholic church and the sacraments — there's nothing quite like that in the Presbyterianism that I grew up with."
Johnson says that he experienced "a million little shifts" of perspective on religion throughout production. "I didn't convert at the end of the process," he clarifies, laughing. "But right now, in 2025, I do find that the positive things about faith, and the things that were the guiding lights for me during that time, are things that I find myself pining for — not in terms of wanting to be a believer again, but concepts like loving your enemy, and the idea of the heart of a servant, and the idea of meeting people where they're at. Those just suddenly seem like very radical ideas right now."
Wake Up Dead Manis now playing in select theaters and streaming on Netflix.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly
