The enigma that is Benoit Blanc

The greatest mystery in Rian Johnson's “Knives Out” movies might be Benoit Blanc.

- 

DANIEL Craig as Benoit Blanc (AP)

(AP)

Over the course of three films, Johnson and Daniel Craig have stingily dropped clues to Blanc's past and personal life. Since Blanc first introduced himself in “Knives Out” as “a respectful, quiet, passive observer ... of the truth,” following the breadcrumbs has been a sport of its own.

There are, for instance, the vague, offhand references to cases he's cracked before: something with a tennis champion, another with a ballet dancer and, in the latest chapter, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” we hear about something dastardly at the Kentucky Derby that he solved.

Blanc has been profiled in The New Yorker and a guest on “The View.” He appears to live with Hugh Grant. He dislikes the board game Clue. Having been caught singing Sondheim and, in the new one, humming “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat,” from “Cats,” we know he loves musical theater.

Over the course of the “Knives Out” trilogy, Johnson and Craig have colored in Blanc with sporadic and comic revelations, adding subtle, and sometimes personal, characteristics.

“I'm not as much into musical theater as Rian,” Craig says, sitting beside his director in a recent interview.

“So he claims in front of a microphone,” adds Johnson.

Every “Knives Out” movie is wholesale change. New setting. New case. New cast of characters. But Craig and Johnson are the mainstays. Together, they've turned Blanc, the last of the gentleman sleuths, into one of the greatest — “Halle Berry!” — protagonists in recent movies.

In “Wake Up Dead Man,” which opens in theaters soon, Blanc takes up the case of a monsignor (Josh Brolin) who dies mysteriously in the middle of a church service.