Daniel Craig only starred in 'Knives Out' because of James Bond delay

Knives Out writer and director Rian Johnson has thanked the repeated delays to No Time To Die, revealing that these push-backs gave Daniel Craig the window of opportunity to play Benoit Blanc in the crime mystery.

Johnson made this admission to The Hollywood Reporter, originally admitting that he wrote the character of Blanc without Craig in mind because he didn’t want to be disappointed.

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“When I'm writing, I've learned that you’ll always get your heart broken if you have your eyes set on somebody because the schedule will always not work out or something will happen. So, I try to write with a blank slate, but then he was top of my list."

"Then it was a very serendipitous moment when the Bond movie pushed three months. This was not like the injury he had; this was before that. It was just a logistic thing, they pushed their schedule, so he suddenly had a window open and we got in there right away and he said yes right away, and we were making the movie right away."

During the same interview, Johnson admitted that he’d had the “basic idea” of Knives Out percolating in his head for around 10 years, but only started to write it in January, 2018, after he had finished his mammoth press commitments for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. From that point on, though, “It was a very, very quick process.”

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“Essentially, I started writing in January, first draft in the summer, by September or so I had a finished draft, or a draft I was comfortable sending out. We went to Daniel Craig, he said yes and we were shooting the movie six weeks later. It was really, really quick."

Johnson will already be hard at work on the sequel to Knives Out, which Lionsgate confirmed following the its gross of over $300 million at the box office.