Innersloth’s 2018 phenomenon “Among Us,” for the uninitiated, is an online mystery that is played in groups. Players, each playing from their own computer, are assigned an identity at the start of the game. Most players are brightly-uniformed astronauts — Crewmates — who must run about a spacecraft completing very simple tasks to keep the ship from malfunctioning. Some players, however, are secretly aliens in disguise — Imposters — who try to kill off the Crewmates without being detected. Should suspicions run high, players can call meetings and vote to have other players voted out. Those voted out will be cast into the void of space, whether they are Imposters or not. If the Imposters are detected, the Crewmates win. If the Crewmates are all killed, the Imposters win. It’s an interactive version of similar elimination games like “Mafia,” “Cry_Wolf,” “Werewolves Within,” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies.”
Benoit Blanc, from his screen glimpse in “Glass Onion,” was an Imposter named BlancMan22 that Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Natasha Lyonne, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar detected and cast off the ship.
According to a December 2022 interview with the New York Times, Rian Johnson said that he had always wanted to work with both Lansbury and Sondheim because he, along with much of the planet, was a great admirer of their work. Additionally, both performers were known, at least partially for their dabbling in murder mystery media themselves. Lansbury appeared in the long-running TV series “Murder, She Wrote” and Sondheim wrote the Robert Hoss’ murder mystery film “The Last of Sheila” in 1973 as well as the short-lived Broadway play “Getting Away with Murder” in 1966. they were clearly fans of whodunnits, and it stands to reason that they, in real life, might be friends with an eccentric P.I. like Benoit Blanc.