Whether you appreciate Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery or think Rian Johnson has just pulled another Last Jedi with the sequel to his acclaimed 2019 whodunit, no one can quite ignore the unbelievably brilliant acting at play here by this star-studded cast.
One of these up-and-comers is English actress Jessica Henwick, whom you’ll likely best recognize as Nymeria Sand in Game of Thrones and Colleen Wing in Iron Fist. Henwick plays the part of Birdie’s (Kate Hudson) anxious assistant and steals the spotlight in quite a number of scenes, especially one at the end when everybody decides to shatter Miles Bron’s collection of crystalline sculptures.
Apparently, when it was Henwick’s turn to smash a huge wheel of glass, she accidentally dropped it and looked straight at the camera before Johnson managed to yell “action” but the take was so funny that the filmmaker decided to keep it in.
“One of my favorite moments was Jess had a massive one that she got to smash, and she was so excited,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s a massive wheel of glass. We start rolling the camera, and I’m saying to her, ‘Okay, we want to get this exactly right. We only have one of these. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to say one, two, three.’ She drops it and then looks right into the camera and does this [makes a shocked face.] We had started the camera just to practice the thing. She broke it and then looked right in the camera. That’s the take that’s in the movie.”
Revisiting the film, you can definitely catch Henwick shocked and looking straight at the camera lens, but it’s more in the vein of one of those blink-and-you-miss-it shots. Not quite breaking the fourth wall, though there’s hardly anything accidental about the way she does it. Henwick was just too excited to smash that wheel.
After a limited run in theaters, Glass Onion is now available for streaming on Netflix. Critics have dubbed it a worthy successor to Benoit Blanc’s original suburban detective case, and you can read We Got This Covered’s very own review of the film here.