One of the most satisfying scenes in the Knives Out 2 Glass Onion ending is when Helen (Janelle Monae) encouraged the ‘Disruptors’ to stand up to bullying, egotistical billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton) by smashing up all of his expensive art pieces.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Rian Johnson refers to Miles’ art pieces as “Chekhov’s glass bauble” (a play on ‘Chekhov’s gun’) — meaning that their role in the detective movie‘s climax was inevitable. However, he revealed that filming the scene in the Netflix movie wasn’t smooth sailing for every actor — namely, Jessica Henwick, who plays Birdie’s (Kate Hudson’s) timid PR manager Peg.
Following in Helen’s footsteps, Peg drops a glass sculpture, shatters it, and proceeds to give a pained, shocked look to the camera. According to Johnson, this reaction by Henwick wasn’t acted, because she dropped the prop by accident.
“One of my favorite moments was, Jess had a massive one that she got to smash, and she was so excited,” the comedy movie‘s director recalled. “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.”
“I still have nightmares about that moment,” Henwick added. “I broke into a cold sweat.” You can watch the 2022 movie on streaming service Netflix now, or if you want to see some other much-hyped films, check out our guide to the best movies of all time.