Glass Onion Director Explains Why Gay Relationship Isn't Center Stage

Knives Out fans who didn’t get to see the film’s sequel Glass Onion during its short theatrical release are eager for the Netflix drop December 23. And what makes it all the more exciting is knowing that Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc is being confirmed as gay within the narrative.

Writer and director Rian Johnson recently spoke to ScreenRant about that decision, noting that he “felt like having Blanc be gay and have a partner just felt like a very natural thing coming out of the first movie.”

Still, we know from people who have already seen the film that the detective and his partner (played by Hugh Grant) never appear on screen together during Glass Onion. Some had theorized it may have been a result of COVID, while others speculated it was yet another case of a film wanting credit for LGBTQ+ representation without actually showing anything.

But Johnson put both of those theories to rest, and his explanation for why the film didn’t have more of the relationship may actually be a positive for increased representation moving forward.

“It’s a delicate thing…because the detective is always at the center of a good murder mystery; the detective is never the protagonist of a good murder mystery,” he said. “And I feel like in general, if you think about Poirot, for example, I feel like getting glimpses of the detective’s life outside of the scope of the case is interesting. But I don’t know that I can ever see the movies being more about that. The whole thing is kind of about the mystery itself.”

A frequent defense for excluding LGBTQ+ characters from movies and TV, particularly in years past, has been that they aren’t included when there isn’t a narrative purpose to it. And that’s something LGBTQ+ people have always pushed back against — if heterosexual characters can simply exist in movies with the smallest details clueing us in to their relationships or sexuality when they come up, there’s no reason the same shouldn’t be true for queer characters.

It sounds like that’s exactly where Johnson is going with Blanc. He’s right in that detectives in classically styled mysteries, as the Knives Out stories are, are at the center but are not themselves the protagonists, so diving into their motivations and personalities and lives beyond what is necessary can actually detract from the story and muddle things. But it made sense for Blanc’s character to be gay, even without a big to-do or narrative purpose, and so he was gay.

And just because Johnson doesn’t see his stories revolving around that relationship in the future doesn’t mean we won’t learn more as his escapades continue beyond the second film.

“It’s a big part of who he is, and going forward, it’s going to be fun to learn more about that,” he said. “It’s true, it is just a glimpse of it. And that was one thing that I thought about; we’re obviously going to want to see more of this.”