Daniel Craig brushed up on his voice to shoot “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” sharing that he worked with a coach in order to regain the Southern accent that he used to play detective Benoit Blanc in the first “Knives Out.”
“I went away to work with an accent coach for three or four months before we started shooting,” Craig told Empire magazine in the publication’s upcoming profile of “Glass Onion.” “I’d forgotten the accent and I didn’t want to do a pastiche. I wanted to make it as grounded and as anchored in reality as possible.”
In the first “Knives Out,” Blanc’s voice is described by the uppity Ransom Drysdale (played by Chris Evans) as a “Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl” — a far cry from Craig’s own British accent, which he employed across his 15-year tenure leading the James Bond series.
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” is set in Greece on the private island of a tech billionaire played by Edward Norton. While Craig’s Blanc was already a fish-out-of-water in the first film’s Massachusetts setting, the detective will probably be even more of an outsider in the world of European luxury.
Along with Craig and Norton, the cast also includes Kathryn Hahn, Kate Hudson, Lesle Odom Jr., Janelle Monáe, Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Dave Bautista and Ethan Hawke
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” is set to premiere on Netflix on Dec. 23, but the film will make its world premiere much sooner than that, playing at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September.