&34;I was as shocked as I hope audiences will be.&34; Why Josh O'Connor struggled to grasp Knives Out's big twist: 'I got it wrong every time' &34;I was as shocked as I hope audiences will be.&34; By Sydney Bucksbaum :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/headshotb5dc24df8d5d43d1a16c9ce0e0383119.jpg) Sydney Bucksbaum Sydney Bucksbaum is a staff writer at . She has been working at EW since 2019 and is a published author. Her work has previously appeared in TV Guide Magazine, E! News/E! Online, The Hollywood Reporter, Mashable, Bustle, IGN, DCComics.com, Inverse, The Daily Northwestern, and more.

"I was as shocked as I hope audiences will be."

Why Josh O'Connor struggled to grasp Knives Out's big twist: 'I got it wrong every time'

"I was as shocked as I hope audiences will be."

By Sydney Bucksbaum

Sydney Bucksbaum

Sydney Bucksbaum is a staff writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2019 and is a published author. Her work has previously appeared in *TV Guide Magazine*, E! News/E! Online, *The Hollywood Reporter*, Mashable, Bustle, IGN, DCComics.com, Inverse, *The Daily Northwestern*, and more.

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December 14, 2025 10:00 a.m. ET

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Josh O'Connor in 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery'. Credit:

**This article contains spoilers about *Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.***

The murder case in *Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery *is so hard to solve that even Josh O'Connor couldn't predict the twist ending when he first read the script.

The Emmy-winning actor stars in Rian Johnson's third *Knives Out *whodunnit as Rev. Jud Duplenticy, a pastor with a violent past who becomes the main suspect when a seemingly impossible death strikes his new small-town parish. And while the *Crown* alum is a longtime murder-mystery superfan, he admits he "got it wrong every time" when he tried to speculate who the killer was while reading the script.

"It's a credit to Rian's writing — he's so lean with his writing, he never needs to give you a red herring," O'Connor tells **. "I'm a slow reader because I'm dyslexic, but I'm very dyslexic, so it takes me two or three reads to sort of understand any script. What I'll do is I'll read a page, then reread the page, and reread that page again, and then I'll move on to the next page. So I read every page three times so that it can go into my head."

Josh O'Connor in 'Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery'.

But O'Connor especially struggled to figure out which character — potentially even his own — was guilty, because the story is "the toughest cryptic crossword of murder mysteries."

"I do my process and read and read and read, and about a quarter of the way through [the script], I'd stop for a cup of tea and just write down my guesses," he says. "I'd be like, 'I think it's him,' or 'I think it's her.' And I got it wrong every time."

When Jud first arrives at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude to become the new associate pastor, he's optimistic about preaching forgiveness, love, and hope to his new flock. However, his faith is shaken by the powerful, fear-mongering Msgr. Wicks (Josh Brolin), who rules over the upstate New York church with a fire-and-brimstone iron fist. When Wicks is murdered in front of the entire congregation, Jud seems to be the obvious suspect, yet Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to solve the case because he believes Jud is innocent.

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However, as the evidence piles up against Jud, even he begins to doubt his own innocence. But Benoit remains his faithful advocate, and ultimately figures out that Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), and groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church) worked together to murder Wicks and protect a decades-old secret fortune that he had been plotting to steal.

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"I was as shocked as I hope audiences will be," O'Connor says of the "impossible to know" twist ending. "But what's so brilliant about Rian is that every single one of [these characters] is guilty in different ways, and they're all complicit and they're all flawed. No one is pristine... and that's all Rian Johnson. That's what he does best."

*Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery *is now streaming on Netflix.

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Source: Thriller

Published: December 14, 2025 at 06:38PM on Source: ANDY MAG

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