Andrew Scott joins Josh O’Connor and Daniel Craig in Knives Out 3: Wake Up Dead Man

Someone bring us some smelling salts. Hot Priest is in the house.

Andrew Scott has joined the upcoming third Knives Out movie, which will be called Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Scott’s casting comes the day after Josh O’Connor and Cailee Spaeny were announced as the first actors to jump aboard the Daniel Craig-led franchise. The format works in a similar vein to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, which follows the detective across different cases.

Scott is one of the most in-demand actors of the moment, best known for his role in Fleabag as The Priest, which was dubbed as Hot Priest. He has also played Moriarty, the villainous foil to Sherlock in the Benedict Cumberbatch series.

More recently, he was in the supernatural romance All of Us Strangers and the black-and-white streaming adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, Ripley. Wake Up Dead Man will be a reunion between Scott and Craig, who were both in the Bond movie, Spectre.

Brit O’Connor has just released the Zendaya movie Challengers as well as the Italian drama La Chimera and was nominated for an Emmy for playing the young Prince Charles in The Crown. Spaeny won the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival for her role as Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and was also in Civil War.

The flurry of news surrounding the project signals that Wake Up Dead Man must be ramping up production. The release date is expected to be sometime in 2025.

The first Knives Out movie was released in 2019 and featured Craig as Benoit Blanc, a mercurial detective with a gift for solving complex crimes. The first film also starred Jamie Lee Curtis, Christopher Plummer, Ana de Armas and Chris Pine and was set in a New England mansion.

The movie was a commercial success, grossing $US312 million from a modest $US40 million budget. Johnson was nominated for an original screenplay Oscar.

Netflix swooped in and negotiated the rights with Johnson and his producer partner Ram Bergman, clinching two sequels in a gargantuan $US450 million deal.

The sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery followed in 2022 and transported the action to a private Greek island with a cast that included Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae.

The month before its release, Netflix ran Glass Onion in cinemas for one week, where in the US, it was played across major chains that had previously refused to screen the streamer’s projects. In Australia, it was widely released in cinemas for the same period of time.

While Netflix did not reveal box office figures for Glass Onion, reports at the time estimated its gross at $US15 million, a decent result for a movie that played in only 600 cinemas across North America. As a comparison, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was the number one movie during that time and clocked up $US65 million across 4258 cinemas.

Netflix has yet to confirm whether Wake Up Dead Man will be released in cinemas at all, and if so, for how long and how wide.

Netflix has flirted with limited cinema runs but its co-chief executive Ted Sarandos has consistently argued that a streaming release is just as impactful.

This past week, in an interview with The New York Times, Sarandos said Barbie and Oppenheimer, which had a combined global box office of $US2.4 billion, would have had a “big” audience if it had been on Netflix.

“And, so, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that certain kinds of movies do or don’t work [on Netflix]. There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people.

“My son’s an editor. He is 28 years old, and he watched Lawrence of Arabia on his phone.”

Netflix’s film division has recently had a leadership change with long-time producer Dan Lin taking over from Scott Stuber, who left to start his own production business. It was widely reported that Sarandos and Stuber had clashed over release strategies.

Lin has worked on the likes of The Lego Movie, the live-action Aladdin remake, the Godzilla franchise and It.