Many viewers likely missed the Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out cameo that happened early on in the movie. This is because it is impossible to see the actor on the screen during his cameo. Directed by Rian Johnson, the mystery thriller Knives Out included an all-star cast and a murder mystery premise. With names like Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and more, it was easy to miss that Gordon-Levitt cameo, especially since he wasn’t advertised as appearing in the movie. The Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out moment is conceptually hidden in a frame within a frame, but the 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). After taking on one of the starring roles in Johnson’s third movie, Looper, 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. Knives Out was just the latest in that trend.
When Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Knives Out Cameo Happens
The Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out cameo comes in the form of a voice that 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 because Gordon-Levitt has been in several Rian Johnson movies now.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is In Every Rian Johnson Movie
The Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out cameo is partly due to a longstanding partnership with director Rian Johnson. 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. Johnson and Gordon-Levitt have been working together for years. Johnson made his directorial debut in 2005 with the movie Brick. This was another mystery, as Johnson focused on a high school murder. However, all the kids use slang dialect that made it feel like a Mickey Spillane novel taking place in a high school environment, with Levitt’s character trying to find out who killed his girlfriend.
Johnson also cast Gordon-Levitt in one of the lead roles in his 2012 sci-fi movie Looper. In this film, Gordon-Levitt was a hired assassin who killed people sent back in time via a time machine from the future. He would then eliminate the bodies in his time and the deaths in the future could never be solved. However, when his future self was sent back for him to kill (in the form of Bruce Willis), he isn’t able to pull the trigger and the two set out to expose a wide-spreading conspiracy.
While those were the only two Rian Johnson movies that had a Joseph Gordon-Levitt lead role, he also appeared in every movie Rian Johnson made in a cameo role. In The Brothers Bloom, he was a patron at a bar. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, he was Slowen Lo, an alien that tried to stop Rose and Finn from landing on Canto Bight. In Knives Out, he was the voice on the phone. He also appeared in an episode of the Rian Johnson TV series, Poker Face, “Escape from Sh*t Mountain.” He played Trey Nelson, a wealthy man on house arrest for insider trading.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is Also In The Knives Out Sequel
It didn’t stop there either. On top of appearing in Knives Out in a voice role, there was also a Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out cameo in the sequel, Glass Onion. This means that Gordon-Levitt has appeared in every single movie that Rian Johnson has made, and in an episode of his TV show as well. There were a lot of cameos in Glass Onion. Some were obvious, such as when Ethan Hawke showed up on the beach to offer everyone a nose spray to protect them from a certain infectious disease, only to never show up again.
As for the Joseph Gordon-Levitt Knives Out cameo in the sequel, it happened with yet another voice role. Just like in the first movie, Gordon-Levitt didn’t show up on screen, but his voice was clearly heard. Instead of a person talking on a TV in the background, this time it was Gordon-Levitt providing the voice for Miles’ clock. The billionaire had an hourly “dong” ringing out on the island every hour. While this could obviously just be a loud annoying noise, Johnson made sure that the Knives Out sequel’s clock was a loud, annoying “Dong,” spoken by one of his most frequent collaborators.
