‘If we run out, we’re screwed’: The making of that shocking ‘Glass Onion’ scene
Warning: This story contains spoilers for “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”
Peel back the layers of “Knives Out 2’s” titular glass onion, and what do you get?
More glass.
At the heart of billionaire tech mogul Miles Bron’s (Edward Norton) garish Greek-island mansion lies a trophy room with dozens of glass statues as fragile as the ego and as transparent as the motives of their nefarious owner. In “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” Miles is eager to show off his shiny art collection to his posse of morally corrupt friends after inviting them to a murder-mystery party at his private Mediterranean estate.
While filming the follow-up to Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunit on location in Greece, the star-studded cast had to carefully navigate a minefield of breakable, abstract figures painstakingly crafted by the film’s production team. Until, of course, it came time to shoot the climactic scene in which Miles’ esteemed guests turn against him and smash his statue garden to smithereens.
“At that point, it had been several months of us filming on this set where everyone is terrified, tiptoeing around these delicate glass structures on pedestals, not wanting to knock them over,” Johnson told The Times last month at the Los Angeles premiere of “Glass Onion.”
“So everybody was so primed to want to smash that s—, I didn’t have to tell them anything. In fact, they were all kind of calling out, ‘I want that one,’ ‘I want to smash that one.’”
The shocking moment arrives shortly after the mystery film’s denouement. To avenge the murder of her identical twin, Helen (Janelle Monáe) presents the authentic bar napkin upon which her sister, Andi (also Monáe), penned the original plan for Alpha Industries. In a desperate move, Miles — who co-founded Alpha with Andi before cutting her out of the company and persuading their mutual friends to testify in court that he wrote the idea for Alpha on a napkin — sets Helen’s only shred of physical evidence on fire.
Distraught and seemingly defeated, Helen retaliates by destroying some of Miles’ personal property. She starts by shattering one of the glass statues in his lair — then another, and another. Soon the rest of the vacationers — including those who previously defended Miles and betrayed Andi under oath — join in.
According to Leslie Odom Jr., who plays scientist Lionel Toussaint, the statue-breaking sequence was one of the last scenes they shot, “obviously, because we ... couldn’t put that stuff back together.”
“That’s a communal primal scream,” he said at the “Glass Onion” premiere. The cast members “fed off of each other. ... And we were such a family by then. We really were dancing together. We really felt one another. ... I was just trying to take that energy, receive and give.”