The first time you see Edward Norton as billionaire Miles Bron in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, he’s sitting on the beach of his private Greek island, strumming the Beatles’ “Blackbird” on a guitar. Not just any guitar, though — that’s Sir Paul McCartney’s guitar, which Miles proceeds to carelessly drop on the floor, letting it land with a dissonant clang. But as Norton tells Krista Smith in a new episode of the podcast Skip Intro, that detail tells you exactly who Miles Bron is. 

“Right in the beginning Rian [Johnson] and I were looking for something. Like, ‘Okay, he's sitting on the beach, he's waiting for his friends. What is it?’ I said to Rian, ‘What if the next person he sees, he just drops that guitar.’ We just started cracking up. That was it. Once you see that it's not just that he would buy McCartney's guitar, but that he would toss it. [That’s] everything you need to know about him.”

That bit of improv aside, Norton gives all credit to Johnson for pulling off a difficult balancing act and toeing the line between satire and joyful fun. “I loved that, without making it heady, without making it preachy, he found a great, satirical way to lace the moment that we're living in through this delightful and comedic mystery,” he says. “That's hard. You have to be really pitch-perfect to get to do this kind of movie, have it be entertaining, but more so because it has just a little sauce, a little zest of the zeitgeist.”

“It's like a soufflé,” Norton adds. “He's able to get all that in there and make sure that it levitates and doesn't collapse.”

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery  is now streaming on Netflix. For more great celebrity interviews, check out Skip Intro on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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