If you’ve watched Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery on Netflix recently, perhaps you’ve noticed a special little cameo in there from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but more likely you’ve absolutely no idea he featured at all.
See if you can find him in the video below:
Since it was released, people have been raving about Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery film – particularly some apparent digs at celebrities such as Lana Del Rey and Elon Musk - although there has been a bit of criticism over it being set during the Covid-19 pandemic because – well – we’re all a bit sick of that, aren’t we?
Advert
Anyway, the film has a stellar ensemble cast with stars such as Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monáe, and Dave Bautista all featuring heavily.
However, there’s one particular actor who you probably didn’t notice was in the film at all – Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Yes, the star of The Dark Knight Rises, Inception, and Snowden did briefly turn up at one stage, but can you guess where?
Here’s a clue – his role isn’t anywhere as big as it was in those films we’ve listed, although he is a frequent apparition, he only has one word in the whole piece.
That’s because he’s the ‘hourly dong’ that gets played in the Glass Onion.
On the island owned by Edward Norton’s character Miles Bron, for whatever reason they play a loud ‘dong’ every hour.
That’s where Gordon-Levitt was really given his chance to shine.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight about how that cameo came to be, director Johnson said: “He’s in an episode of this TV show I’m doing with Natasha Lyonne [Poker Face], Joe is the guest star of one of those episodes,
“I just said, you have to trust me, say the word ‘dong’ really loudly.”
“There’s a thing on the island where every hour, you hear, ‘Dong!’ and it’s the hourly dong, and goes off every hour,
“That’s a reference to one of my favourite mystery movies Evil Under the Sun, there’s a big [plot point] in it with the ‘noonday gun,’ and they shoot a canon off at noon every day.”
So, instead of firing off artillery every day, there’s an hourly dong.
Except it wasn’t originally supposed to be a dong, it was supposed to be a gong.
Johnson explained: “In the script, it’s written as, I think, the ‘hourly gong,'
“One time, when everybody was saying it, [Joseph] said it wrong and said the ‘hourly dong.’ And I said, ‘That’s it, it’s the hourly dong now.'”
There’s also a couple of other significant cameos in the film from Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim.
Whilst they only have small roles in the film, it was their last on-screen moments as both died recently, Lansbury in October at the age of 96 and Sondheim at 91 in November.
Johnson added: “I don’t want to blow it up too much, it’s just one little fun moment that they have,
“But what it meant for me, besides just how special it is to have both of them in the movie, it meant that I just got to spend 10 minutes with each of them to film this little moment.
“Getting to meet them, getting to tell Angela Lansbury what her work meant to me, telling her about watching the filmed version of Sweeney Todd that was on cable when I was a kid and how that really kind of started me loving musical theatre… It felt like a very special privilege to get to do that.”
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is available to watch on Netflix now.
Topics: Netflix, Celebrity, TV and Film
Tom Wood