The Muppets are everybody’s favorite and there’s no end to the number of actors and actresses who have performed with the motley cast of felt creatures over the years, including Michael Caine in everybody of a certain age’s favorite version ofA Christmas Carol, but the question recently sprung up: What would Benoit Blanc ofKnives OutandGlass Oniondo if if he got to spend time with them?
Netflix recently ran an interview with Rian Johnson and asked the directorif his charmingly outsized Southern detective Benoit Blanc could, say, meet the Muppets and the director gave his response: he’s not ruling it out, but he has other plans for the character, first.
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WithGlass Onioneating up the dialogue right now, it makes sense that everyone is speculating about what could happen in the future for Benoit Blanc and one idea that sprang up recently was that the master detective could meet the master comedians that make up the cast of the Muppets. It’s not as if the Muppets are new to crime stories—The Great Muppet Caper, after all, was about the mystery of a stolen jewel, and even Brian Henson directed a movie calledThe Happytime Murders, a noir set in a world of puppets and humans. The question then becomes how they would bounce off the Southern charm of Benoit Blanc.
Blanc, who Daniel Craiginfuses with all the realism of Foghorn Leghorn, would be the kind of outlandish character the Muppets regularly meet up with, and Craig’s penchant for hamming it up and chewing the scenery as the current World’s Greatest Detective would provide the Muppets plenty of fodder in turn. And it’s not as if the detective hasn’t taken on the racist, snobby members of a famous mystery novelist or the terminally online friends of a fraud of a startup founder. The Muppets wouldn’t be any more outlandish than these human clowns have been. At first taking the idea as a joke, Johnson then spent some time thinking about his detective meeting with the beloved characters. As he told Netflix, “As much as I take the murder mystery genre seriously, I take the genre of a Muppet movie seriously.”
Considering that Johnson has also directed Frank Oz twice—once as Yoda inThe Last Jediand once live as the executor of Harlan Thrombey’s estate inKnives Out—it’s not as if he doesn’t have a toehold in that world already. That said, Johnson went onto clarify that he feels as if the two properties don’t quite work together, or at least would overshadow each other. If Benoit Blanc were to have the Muppets in his movie it’d feel too much like anotherKnives Out Mysteryand if Blanc were to appear with the Muppets, it would simply make him an extra in a Muppet movie. Maybe the answer in how to mix the two properties will become clearer with time, like peeling back the layers of aGlass Onion.
Glass Onionis streaming on Netflix.
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