After murder-mystery Knives Out took the box office by storm in late 2019, Lionsgate officially announced last week that the hit film would be getting a sequel. And despite the original movie's all-star cast—which included seasoned vets like Daniel Craig and rising stars like Ana de Armas—director and screenwriter Rian Johnson revealed at the Oscars on Sunday that he was on the hunt to shake things up for the Knives Out sequel.
Speaking with Variety on the Oscars red carpet, Johnson, who was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, said that while Craig would be reprising his role as detective Benoit Blanc, "other than that, all bets are off." "It’s a totally new cast," he explained. "I want everybody! Just point. Throw a rock on this red carpet and you’ll hit someone that I want in the movie."
It seems like Johnson is trying to make Craig the new Poirot, David Suchet's character in the critically acclaimed mystery TV series Agatha Christie's Poirot, which ran from 1989 to 2013. Poirot was always the central figure in the long-running series, but the plot, setting, and characters around him continuously changed.
"In my mind, I don't even think of it in terms of a sequel," Johnson told SiriusXM earlier in February. "If we can keep this going, the same way Agatha Christie wrote a bunch of Poirot novels, and then do that with Blanc and keep making new mysteries—whole new cast, whole new locations... It's just another Benoit Blanc mystery and it seems like there's just so many different things you can do with it."
Fans may be disappointed to hear that De Armas won't necessarily be back for the sequel to Knives Out, which was a breakout role for the Cuban-Spanish actress. But she nearly turned down the part of Marta Cabrera because the character was described as a "pretty Latin caretaker," and she didn't want to contribute to negative Latinx stereotypes. Once she read the script and then won the role, however, she added nuance and depth to the character that earned her a ton of accolades, including a Golden Globe nomination.
Even though De Armas has a big year ahead in 2020—playing the new Bond girl in No Time to Die; starring in the Netflix biopic Sergio about United Nations diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello; playing opposite Ben Affleck in the upcoming erotic thriller Deep Water; and taking on the role of the one and only Marilyn Monroe in Netflix's Blonde—it seems she'll always have a special place in her heart for Marta.
"The previous Latina, Spanish-speaking parts that I’ve seen before, they’ve really not necessarily had the best qualities or possibilities. Or they don’t really reflect our community or our strengths,” De Armas told Variety of Marta in Nov. 2019. “Definitely in this set of a wealthy family, that’s not a character that you can even imagine succeeding and getting out of the whole situation well. So, I was just happy to read something so surprising and positive and new and fresh.”
