Knives Out: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Secret Cameo Revealed

An early Knives Out moment features a Joseph Gordon-Levitt cameo, but it’s impossible to see the actor on screen. Directed by Rian Johnson, the new whodunnit thriller includes an all-star cast and a murder mystery premise. Gordon-Levitt’s cameo is conceptually hidden in a frame within a frame, but audio is the primary clue.

Gordon-Levitt understands the beauty of a cameo. After starring in Johnson’s feature directorial debut, Brick, he returned for a small role in the director’s second film, The Brothers Bloom (playing a shirt-and-tie bar patron). Gordon-Levitt played himself for an uncredited cameo role in The Interview, and secretly reunited with Johnson to voice Slowen Lo in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, portraying the alien who doesn’t like that Rose and Finn illegally landed on a beach.

In Knives Out, Gordon-Levitt’s voice is heard during an early kitchen moment featuring Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas). At home, her sister watches a program on her laptop, and an unseen character named Brendan Frye can be heard saying “We have the nanny cam footage.” Viewers who won’t recognize Gordon-Levitt’s voice will surely miss this cameo, and it may even go over most moviegoers’ heads since it’s so brief and subtle. But perhaps that’s what makes it all the more interesting.

A lot of times, directors like to work with specific actors and they’ll go to great lengths to have them appear in all of their movies. Of course, there may not be a major role for them in each movie, but then those actors will at least appear in a cameo. Something similar to Gordon-Levitt’s cameo happened in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, for instance. In that film, Michael Caine could be heard as one of the pilots, and he’s typically seen in Nolan’s films. It’s the same case with Johnson and Gordon-Levitt, who’ve been working together for years. But does Gordon-Levitt’s cameo have any deeper meaning to it?

Thematically, Gordon-Levitt’s Knives Out cameo connects to the film’s inciting incident and main protagonist. The murder mystery is built around the immense wealth of crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who’s under the care of Marta when he’s found dead. Thrombey’s family assembles to figure out what exactly happened, and they’re all fully invested in how much they’ll inherit. Just as Gordon-Levitt’s character declaratively reminds someone about private footage, Johnson plays with that premise throughout Knives Out to build suspense, and then to subvert expectations. The only question is: does Johnson have a cameo in Knives Out as well?

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Q.V. Hough
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Q.V. Hough is a senior writer at Screen Rant. He’s also the founding editor at Vague Visages, and has contributed to RogerEbert.com and Fandor.

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