Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’ follows the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc on the private island of a tech billionaire named Miles Bron. Miles had planned a murder mystery game for his friends, but soon, things take a violent turn when one of them dies. Taking place over the course of one day, the story quickly turns from a gathering of friends to a murder of foes, and Blanc is caught in the middle of it. As we find out the secrets of the people that he is investigating, we start to wonder about Blanc himself. Where is he from? What is his accent? If you are wondering about the same, then we’ve got you covered.
The Origins of Benoit Blanc and His Accent
While Blanc solves the mysteries by looking into every secret of his suspects, he himself remains quite a mystery to the audience. His backstory, who he is, where he came from, how he became a detective, nothing of this sort is talked about in the film. This makes sense because the stories are more focused on the case at hand, which doesn’t have anything to do with Blanc’s background. And director Rian Johnson wanted to keep it that way.
While talking with Netflix Tudum about Blanc, the director said that the intention was to keep Blanc a mystery. When he first wrote the character, he added the simple note of a “slight Southern drawl” to give Daniel Craig something to latch on to. The note gave a lot of leeway to Craig who decided to go for it, giving the accent a twist of his own. “I may not have done that [speaking of the slight in the drawl], but I went for it. He [Rian Johnson] wanted something that placed him [Blanc], that separated him from the rest of the characters — kind of maybe leaves him open for ridicule,” the actor told NPR.
While it was an exciting thing to try out as an actor, Craig was also worried that he might not get it right. The first time he tried it out in front of the rest of the cast, he was very nervous. “Jamie Lee Curtis was standing in front of me. And the rest of these brilliant actors. And they’re just all like, ‘Come on then.’ It was like, ‘Okay, here we go,’,” he said. Luckily, the accent turned out rather well and became one of the distinctive qualities of his character, one that Chris Evans’ character liked to make fun of, calling it “Kentucky-fried Foghorn Leghorn drawl”.
Blanc’s accent is one of the things that makes the audience more intrigued with him. It also establishes him as an outsider to an otherwise tightly-knit group of people. He never talks about himself, so, it is through his actions that little things about his life are revealed, and for Craig, that is enough. While talking to Josh Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused, Craig said that the vagueness surrounding Blanc, and the lack of his background story, is much like the one we see with characters like Hercule Poirot.
“He [Poirot] sort of appeared from somewhere, solved the case, and then went somewhere else. That mystery is important. He’s not the center of attention. He [Blanc] should be an enigma. I don’t need to know what he was up to when he was 12. I’m happy for people to just make it up [his life],” the James Bond actor said. With all this in mind, we can conclude that Benoit Blanc comes from one of the southern states in America, and his accent makes it pretty clear. As for the rest of the details about his life, we’ll have to wait and see if some key information is dropped about him in the next movie or so.
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