Daniel Craig almost forgot how to play Benoit Blanc. It’s not a question of his acting ability — over a career spanning three decades, the English-born actor has continued to impress. No, this memory lapse was a matter of voice. As he prepared to reprise his role as the infamous sleuth in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Craig found himself searching for the Kentucky-fried bloodhound’s textured twang. “I didn’t just sit back and just go, it’ll be there,” Craig tells Tudum. “I wanted to go back and sort of do the basics again.”

What’s in a voice? For a detective, it turns out, quite a bit. It’s a method of interrogation and distraction, a multipurpose tool used to hold a captive group of suspects in check as you unspool the facts of the case before them. “There’s a touch of Tennessee Williams in there,” Craig says of Blanc’s drawl. “There’s a touch of the historian Shelby Foote. It’s trying to create something that’s a bit otherworldly.” Whether it’s Sherlock Holmes’ posh deductive lilt or Agatha Christie character Hercule Poirot’s boisterous Belgian whiff of superiority, there needs to be a sense of mysterious command in the raised voice of an investigator, Craig believes. “One leads to the other,” the actor says of the long line of fictional crime-solvers that precede him. “They’re all blood-related to each other.” Of course, that’s not the only blood that Glass Onion has in store.

Daniel Craig & Rian Johnson Discuss Glass Onion's Benoit BlancThere's no one better to explain than these two.

In writer-director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to 2019’s Knives Out, Craig’s Blanc finds himself mixed up in a brand-new murder mystery — this one centered around a group of privileged friends on a Greek island getaway. It’s as far from the chilly New England milieu of the original Knives Out as one can imagine, and that’s by design. “This one is probably a little more [Dr.] Strangelove-y than Knives Out,” Johnson tells Tudum. It’s a choice that requires Craig’s Blanc to be even more larger-than-life than usual — especially in the first act, for reasons we won’t spoil here. “That's something that Daniel very much baked into it,” Johnson says.

Both Johnson and Craig are, not surprisingly, longtime fans of the murder mystery genre. “It’s amazing reading Sherlock Holmes — I read some just recently — and how very much like modern whodunits they are,” Craig says. “It’s the same kind of tropes that we use over and over, that they’ve tried and tested  — and they work.”

Craig is no stranger to tropes — or to sequels, for that matter. Last year, he finally wrapped up his run as the longest-serving James Bond, only to find himself leaping straight into another sequel with Johnson. But this isn’t just another franchise for the erstwhile 007. “What Rian’s movies do best is they subvert the genre so that you think you’re watching an old-fashioned sort of Agatha Christie–type mystery,” he says. “But then you’re not watching that, you’re watching something else.” Like Craig’s recent Bond films, they’re also far more tied to our current zeitgeist than their more retro contemporaries. “If [Christie had] been writing today, she would’ve written about dot-com billionaires,” Craig says. “She would’ve written about social media stars.”

Gavin Bond for Netflix

In Glass Onion, those personalities are played by another — ahem — murderers’ row of actors, including Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson and Dave Bautista. The twists come fast and furious: One of these characters is a killer, and the others are more than they seem. Some characters are putting on a show, while others are just trying to avoid suspicion.

Like the first Knives Out, Glass Onion benefits from a second (and third and fourth) viewing. Johnson excels at rug-pulling; there are moments in the first and second acts that reveal new and exciting details when viewed from a different angle, like the Mona Lisa’s smile. “You kind of need to watch it a second time, I think, to see what's going on,” Craig says. “[Rian’s] playing 3D chess constantly, and not in a condescending way, in a really inclusive and generous way. There are payoffs, constant payoffs, and if you're watching and enjoying it and concentrating, you'll get every single one.”

All of this is to say that playing Benoit Blanc, as much fun as it looks, isn’t always easy. “You just have to trust the fact that you’re telling the story and that when you watch the whole thing, you’ll understand what's going on,” Craig says. He spent months in advance of the Glass Onion shoot learning and unlearning the detective’s often-flowery lines in order to keep his performance natural. But he says Johnson’s screenplay made it easy for him. “The script is funny off the bat,” Craig says. “It’s a sort of perfect place to be as an actor when you’ve got all of those things and they come together and they work.”

John Wilson/Netflix

Craig consults with director Rian Johnson within the titular Glass Onion.

Johnson agrees. “I feel lucky that the couple of actors that I’ve now worked with multiple times are also people who are some of my dear friends,” he says. “If you can find collaborators that you can keep working with that hold to the higher standard that you do, and that want to have the artistic drive to really make something great, and who also want to have a great experience doing it, I mean, that’s the best you can ask for.”

So, yes, as luck would have it, a year after wrapping up his run as the world’s most famous license-to-kill spy, Daniel Craig has stumbled onto another iconic character — and one, thankfully, that we’ll be seeing more of. Johnson and Craig have already signed on for a third Knives Out mystery, with Johnson hard at work on piecing together Blanc’s next case. All of which makes you wonder if any part of Craig is hesitant about finding himself at the center of another hit franchise so soon after leaving one in the rearview mirror? Does fear lurk in the heart of Benoit Blanc?

“I should be so lucky,” Craig says with a chuckle. “I know the pitfalls and what can go wrong, but ultimately, working with such a talented group of people, it’s yours to fuck up.”

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming on Netflix beginning Dec. 23.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Everything Benoit Blanc Thinks Is Dumb in Glass OnionHe's not to be trifled with.