How 'Knives Out 2' Pays Tribute to Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is full of twists and turns, including a plethora of celebrity cameos bound to take viewers by surprise.

One such instance sees the late Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim make an appearance in the film, marking their last onscreen roles before their deaths. Broadway giant Sondheim passed away on November 21, 2021, and Lansbury, the star of Murder, She Wrote, died on October 11 of this year.

Director Rian Johnson told Newsweek how much it meant to him to have Lansbury and Sondheim appear in his film.

How 'Knives Out 2' Pays Tribute to Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim

Lansbury and Sondheim make their cameos in the Knives Out sequel in a short but funny scene as friends of Daniel Craig's detective character, Benoit Blanc.

The film, which is set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, sees Blanc and the other characters locked down at home and doing what so many did during their real quarantines—play games online with their friends.

In one scene, Blanc hops on Zoom while in the bathtub to play Among Us with his famous pals: Lansbury, Sondheim, Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne and basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

The video game sees players do various tasks on a spaceship, but what they don't know is that one person is an imposter whose goal is to kill everyone else onboard. It's up to those on the other team to try and unmask the imposter before they're all killed.

It is only a short scene, but the film later pays tribute to Lansbury and Sondheim during the end credits.

Looking back at having Sondheim and Lansbury in his film, Johnson said: "I'm heartbroken that they both left us, and it was beyond an honor. It was one of those things of when we came up with the idea we thought 'oh God, would they do it?' It's a tiny little cameo I don't want to oversell it.

"It's just a really small moment in the movie, but they were so generous to agree to do it, and, for me, I went over to Angela's house with my laptop to film her. It was very intimate, and I just zoomed with Sondheim one-on-one, and I just fed him the lines and recorded it."

The Last Jedi director went on: "I was just incredibly grateful that I got to have 10 minutes with each of them, just to tell them how much their work's meant to me. I mean, that was the big thing."

When asked about his fictional character's strategy for the videogame, Johnson joked that Blanc had a "bad one" and that meant "Angela Lansbury busts his a**" He then joked: "It's very bad, which cracks me up."

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is out on Netflix now.