[Warning: This article features spoilers for the ending of Wake Up: Dead Man]
The first we see of Glenn Close in Wake Up Dead Man, Rian Johnson’s acclaimed third Knives Out mystery film, she comes out of nowhere. It’s a comic bit, as Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud, new to the small-town parish where a series of grisly murders will soon occur, suddenly realizes that Close’s devout secretary Martha Delacroix — who’s been a loyal member of the church since childhood — has been standing within a few feet of him without making a peep.
It’s a nice setup for the film’s grand twist, which reveals Martha as the tortured mastermind behind the killings of her church’s domineering priest, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), and later one of its congregants, the town doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner). Martha was hoping to preserve the fortune left by the church’s founder, which had been distilled to a valuable diamond, but after accidentally confessing her secret to Wicks, fell down a treacherous chain of events.
Martha is no ordinary Knives Out killer, then — she epitomizes the film’s complex exploration of faith, betrayal and redemption as her institutional dedication leads her astray. Close holds this all with a rich, at times campy, then heartbreakingly vulnerable performance, with the final scene depicting Martha begging for forgiveness in Jud’s arms, with Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc looking on, as she takes her own life.
In her first extensive interview about the film’s ending, Close tells all to The Hollywood Reporter.
Mila Kunis, Josh O’Connor, Daniel Craig and Glenn Close in ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’
John Wilson/Netflix © 2025
Can you talk a little bit about just those first conversations with Rian encompassing the whole arc of your character and what that was like?
My memory is very sketchy, but I don’t think that he kind of mapped out the whole thing for me because it took me three readings to really understand what was going on and what transpired. It was really complex to read. I’m not terribly good at always reading scripts. I don’t have a visual mind anymore. But we had a shorthand together because he had been very Christian when he was young, and I was in this Christian cult [Moral Re-Armament] when I was young. I was seven when my parents got into it; I didn’t get out of it until I was 22. I wasn’t a rebellious kind. I was a little soldier just trying to please this whole group of people with a main leader. And so I got it, how some people give up their families, they give up their homes. Some of them gave up their engagement rings. I got that somebody could have a life totally subsumed or consumed by the church and this charismatic leader.
Right, I wanted to get into your background, because the reveal of what Martha has done obviously puts who she’s into a new light, but it also just kind of reinforces the way you play her in a lot of ways. When it comes to that level of understanding you’re talking about, was it hard for you to wrap your head around her being the killer?
She had been given this terrible burden. How young she was when [the church’s founder died] died and she saw where the jewel went — that was a secret, and you religiously keep the secret. What a burden that was, and how skewed she was against his daughter. You lose a sense of reason. Her task was to preserve the church, and knowing obviously that the guy was going to take the jewel and leave and spend all the money — I mean, her entire life and being was threatened by that.
With Martha’s first appearance, she kind of pops up out of nowhere and spooks Josh O’Connor’s Jud. You got a few of those comic moments to start. How did they come about?
They were written into the script. The thing that was such a luxury with the script was that not one word was changed. I’ve been in multiple projects where they’re still writing — I mean, the one I’m doing right now, they’re still writing. It’s a series, so that’s a little bit different. But it was really wonderful to say, “This is what we’re going to shoot.”
It also makes you stand out. Were you worried about tipping your hand? Was there a learning curve to acting in a whodunnit since you’re the key to the mystery?
No, it’s funny — I never was worried about giving it away. The tragedy of the whole story is she confesses to the wrong priest, and that’s where it starts. In a way, she sows the seeds of her own destruction.
You get this interesting task, true to the genre of these films, where you have to explain everything that happened at the end of the movie, and you play it so well. And I would imagine it’s a great acting challenge. How do you work through a monologue like that where it doesn’t feel purely expository? It’s a lot of information.
That’s right. And in these movies, it’s usually Daniel Craig.
He hands you the baton there.
It’s a lot. We did it very carefully. If you look at the movie again, you can see where I actually poisoned myself. So she has just a limited amount of time, and I think because she’s very religious, she is moved to confess. The thing that was a surprise to me was the moment when Jud asks her to forgive Grace. I didn’t realize when I read it that that would be such an important moment between the two of us. It was really lovely because it allowed her to die. He had heard her confession and she could die with a clean conscience. It was a very loving act that he does at the end, and Josh O’Connor — I don’t know how many days we shot that; at least two, if not three. I kept thinking, “Boy, I haven’t laid in a man’s arms like this in so long.” It was so great, just looking into his eyes. It became more than just a murder mystery at that point.
How did you figure out the makeup, in tracing her poisoning?
She gets paler and paler, basically. That was the look and that was plotted in how much time has gone by and how much time does she have left, and what do we want her to look like when she dies. That’s all very calibrated.
How many takes did you do?
Well, we did quite a lot. And because there was so much dialogue, we did little sections at a time. A couple of times Rian came over and gave wonderful suggestions, which I always love, but the thing that’s a crazy thing with movies is — it’s just one long rehearsal. You could play a scene 20 different ways. Having done theater, you have the time to at least get the shape of your performance. In movies, it’s almost like a crapshoot. You can come in and you’re prepared and you could do the scene, but you have to trust when the director says, “I’ve got it,” With somebody like Rian, it’s like, “Okay, I trust you.” That scene as a whole, it just became something other than what I thought was on the page,
What do you mean by that?
It became something very real, very moving to both of us. I think Josh would say that as well. At the beginning, you don’t know how real to be. You could have done that scene where she didn’t mean a word — where she wasn’t that vulnerable. Josh, being an Irish Catholic, I think understood that scene on a much deeper level than I did in the beginning. It was really fascinating for me because when I first read it, I didn’t think of it as a great moment of forgiveness and grace.
What did it feel like finishing that final take?
You feel like you’ve really done something — you can feel it. It’s a high, it really is a high. You might be exhausted, but you’re happy-exhausted, and also you get all the input of the people who are watching in that scene. Both Josh and I felt that — you’ve really connected to the actor, and the director’s happy, and you feel like you’ve fulfilled the writing beyond your own expectation. There’s nothing better. Josh was just such a great partner in that.
I know you also had your dog, Pip, with you, watching on.
Pip goes everywhere with me because he helps keep me grounded when I’m away from home. He’s just my little pal, and he really is a remarkable little dog. Everybody who meets him falls in love with him. We just came home from the Hunger Games movie. There’s something about the presence of a little dog that just makes people happy and they can pet him and they can laugh at him, and he is very good. He’s very well behaved, so otherwise he wouldn’t be on the set.
He had torn his ACL or whatever — the dog equivalent — before I had to go over to work, and so they put a plate in. He wasn’t supposed to walk except to pee and poo, so I got a dog-baby carriage. The first time I was on set, we were on location actually at the outside of the church. I appeared with my dog in a baby carriage, and I thought, “Oh my God, they’re going to think I’m so weird. She’s pushing her dog in a baby carriage.” Josh O’Connor, all he wanted was for Pip to be his friend, and Pip for some reason, just never paid attention to him the way he wanted to. But we taught Josh to hide a treat in one of his hands, and then Pip would be very engaged and pick which hand at the treat, and Josh would think, “Oh, now he loves me.”
You’ve been a part of some iconic ensembles. What’s it like joining a Knives Out cast?
On my second movie, The Big Chill, Larry Kasdan asked that all of us come to the set even if we weren’t working — and so we all hung out. We were made to hang out. We also had had a whole month of rehearsal before we started Big Chill, and that was totally unusual, but it really fomented amongst us a great comradery and a great friendship, and it makes all the difference in the world. Now, a lot of times when I go to start a project, I decide first of all if I like what’s on the page — but then it’s also, who am I leaving home for? Who am I going to be spending my life with at this particular very intense amount of time, when I can’t be with my daughter and my new grandson? It better be worth it. So it just makes all the sense in the world that you are given a place where you can gather if you so choose.
With the psychology of how Rian put us all together, there was not a glimmer of an asshole anywhere in front of or behind the camera. To be able to sit, to laugh, to sleep, to read in that situation, I actually felt jealous if I couldn’t be there when I knew that all of the rest of them were there.You just didn’t want to miss out. It became like that.
What’s it like to play those big group scenes? Those can be tough to pull off in a really technical way.
I remember in The Big Chill, in scenes where we all were sitting in the room, one time Larry Kasdan saying, “Okay, if you want to be in the shot, talk faster.” It is a certain dynamic when everyone in the cast is sitting in the same room and you know that everyone has to have their turn. In one of my fondest memories of this whole thing [on Wake Up Dead Man], we did one of the early scenes in the parish house, where we all were in that living room. We hadn’t spent any time together and everybody’s like, “Oh my God, Andrew Scott is coming.” Then when everyone did their turn, it was almost like a rite of passage.