Boston charity gets some love from Chris Evans and ‘Knives Out’
By Isaac Feldberg Globe Correspondent,Updated November 26, 2019, 12:57 p.m.
Locally based Kane's Donuts showed some love for Chris Evans last week, offering a "Knives Out"-themed doughnut.
Captain America, Internet boyfriend, celebrity pet parent: Chris Evans goes by many names. But to Boston charity Christopher’s Haven, the “Avengers” actor is known best for playing patron saint.
Ahead of the annual “Giving Tuesday,” Evans tweeted his support for the organization, a nonprofit that helps to provide housing to families whose children are receiving cancer treatments in the Boston area.
This #GivingTuesday I’ll be supporting @chris_haven, a non-profit that provides supportive housing for families whose children are receiving cancer treatments in Boston. If you’d like to join in to help them reach their #GivingTuesday goal, donate here - t.co/AMNEbEqekJ
— Chris Evans (@chrisevans) November 26, 2019 The Sudbury native has been backing Christopher’s Haven for years, organizing fund-raisers, making viral bets with Marvel co-stars to benefit the organization, and visiting children in treatment. For this year’s Giving Day, on Dec. 3, the organization seeks to raise $50,000 to fund an apartment for a full year that will house seven families within that time period.
With Evans’s latest film, murder mystery “Knives Out,” opening in theaters Wednesday, Christopher’s Haven has seen even more support from the actor’s activities than usual. At its location off Route 1 in Saugus, locally owned Kane’s Donuts recently offered a “Knives Out”-themed item, the “Whodonut,” while giving away movie-related merchandise; a cut of proceeds from that promotion were donated to Christopher’s Haven.
Evans has a lead role in the Rian Johnson-directed “Knives Out,” which was filmed around Massachusetts, with key scenes shot at a 20-room mansion at Borderland State Park in Easton. Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield, Katherine Langford, Jaeden Martell, and Christopher Plummer fill out the movie’s ensemble cast.
Hollywood Reporter How the 'Knives Out' Costume Designer Chose Chris Evans' Perfect Sweater
9:00 AM PST 11/27/2019 by Lindsay Weinberg
"He'd grown up privileged and used his money to buy fancy cars, to buy fancy clothes, but you could tell that he didn't necessarily appreciate those things," says Jenny Eagan of character Ransom. "The holes and the tatter gave him a touch of that disrespect."
Earlier this month, a Twitter conversation about the whodunnit film Knives Out spread online. It wasn't about the identity of the killer, but about a more harmless detail: a particularly cozy white knit sweater that Chris Evans wears onscreen.
"The only thing I will say about Knives Out is that, upon seeing Chris Evans in a sweater, the girl next to me gasped and said very softly and tenderly, 'Sweater,'" tweeted film reporter Anna Menta.
"I'm not sure if it's the sweater or who's wearing the sweater," jokes Knives Out costume designer Jenny Eagan to The Hollywood Reporter. "That might be part of it, too. He looks pretty great."
She and Evans chose the Aran cable knit sweater during a fitting so rushed that she doesn't know the brand, just that it worked perfectly for his character Ransom, the spoiled grandson of acclaimed book author Harlan (Christopher Plummer), to convey his privilege and wealth while the audience tries to determine how Harlan died. Joining The Avengers star in the cast are Jamie Lee Curtis, Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Lakeith Stanfield and Katherine Langford, who play the detectives and family members trying to solve the mystery in a Boston mansion.
Eagan dressed the characters in sweaters to set the tone: it's winter for this big family and the knits lend a sense of comfort that contrasts with the suspenseful storyline. "The sweaters gave it a cozy feeling. You couldn't detect anything," says the costume designer, who previously worked on Widows, Maniac and Catch-22.
For Ransom specifically, director Rian Johnson wanted him to be "this eccentric spoiled boy," Eagan says. "He'd grown up privileged and used his money to buy fancy cars, to buy fancy clothes, but you could tell that he didn't necessarily appreciate those things." She liked the white hue not only because "it was a beautiful color with his eyes," but also because "wealthy people can always wear white — nothing ever gets dirty."
Eagan decided to add some holes and rips to Evans' sweaters (he wears a pale blue one in a later scene) to show Ransom's nonchalant attitude. "He just didn't care. ... I imagine it laying on the chair in his bedroom and he just threw it on day after day," she says. "But giving it little nicks or little holes here and there, meaning he didn't take care of it, ... the holes and the tatter gave him a touch of that disrespect. It was a disrespect to the family, a disrespect to the name, a disrespect to his clothes."
During the process of creating the rips, Eagan would put on the sweater and imagine where she would pull at it if it was too tight. She envisioned the character negligently throwing it into the washing machine and dryer, shrinking it and then stretching it back out. She used tools like a Dremel or sandpaper to create the tears: "I don't get scared. I just go for it. Sometimes it feels natural, like the neck. You always know if it's made of knit, if you break a thread, it unravels."
As spectacular as the sweater is, the other elements of Evans' wardrobe convey Ransom's overall arrogance: "There's a little bit of that attitude. He's better than everybody. He spends all of his money, but he doesn't have to fit a mold and be classic East Coast prep boy. It's a little bit of an edge." Take, for example, his classic dark Ray-Ban sunglasses worn in the Boston cold. "They just read pretentious to a certain degree, but not over-the-top. He's making a statement; he's always trying to make a statement. He draws attention to himself whether it be the car, the expensive coat, the expensive sunglasses," Eagan says.
And his fine wool cashmere scarf almost didn't make it into the film, as it was a last-minute addition.
"I remember the camera test, I said, 'Oh, what about a scarf?' And Rian was like, 'Oh, I don't think so.' I had put a wool one on him. It wasn't as colorful. It wasn't as decorated," she says, explaining that she found scarves in more autumnal colors that appeared more expensive. "I found this one and on the day, I said, 'What about a scarf?' We were on the day of shooting, so he goes, "Let's try it.' And it just came on and I think it's more of a question of 'Should we do it? Should we not do it? Is it too much?' And then he just wore it. It didn't wear him. It was melded in and it felt right in the moment."
Looking back, she loves the choice: "The scarf punched it up and questioned, 'Who is this guy?' That eccentric 'I'm cooler than everybody else.'"
Eagan bought most of the costume options at places ranging from Barneys to boutiques in Los Angeles, Boston and New York, before working with the actors in the fitting room to select the final outfits. "That's where [what] we call the magic happens," Eagan says. "You're like, 'Wow this is perfect.' And that was kind of how Chris' whole fitting was. Everything went on and it's like, 'Well this is fast. OK great.' Because he just fits in clothes so well. Also it depends on the attitude they come in with. If they're really into it and they've thought about it a lot, it's very quick for them because they get it. They gravitate to it."
She says that was especially the case with Evans' tan cashmere coat from New York brand Theory. "He put it on and it was like, 'Wow,'" she says. "He was like 'This is comfortable.' ... It just felt like a second skin to him." They had multiples of the coat (since two dogs jump on it and get it dirty on screen), so Evans might have taken one home as a souvenir. "I do think he took one, if I had to guess," Eagan says. "I do remember him asking and I remember saying, 'You have to ask the powers that be.' But I do think he did take one of those."
Her work on Knives Out was completed quickly; she estimates she saw each cast member about a week before shooting, "so it was kind of fast and furious." The cast's interest in their characters enabled fast decision-making: "You get into a rhythm." Lee Curtis' fitting was like "boom, boom, boom" as well, Eagan says. "She was so excited. I remember her saying to me so much that she always wore black and that she never wore another color, but she definitely saw this character in lots of color and had a specific friend of hers ... She sent me pictures and she was like, 'This was just the character.' It was really specific and it really made it fun."
Actors Shannon, de Armas and Jaeden Martell also sport sweaters on screen, while Eagan and Johnson put Collette, who plays hippie character Joni, in natural and organic looks (often from Australian label Zimmermann) to convey her chill personality. All of Craig's costumes were custom-made.
The goal remained for Eagan to establish defined characters for each actor, but not make them stand out so much that it would give away who committed a crime. "Subconsciously I was probably thinking anytime I was trying to find something, 'How far can I push it without making them stand out? Without drawing too much attention to them?'" she says. "You had to keep them all warm and relatable to a certain extent. If not, it would just be icy cold and you wouldn't like them and you would immediately think that that was the one."
Knives Out opens in theaters on Wednesday.
MRC is the studio behind Knives Out, and shares a parent company, Valence Media, with The Hollywood Reporter.
Knives Out production designer on that crazy house, and which details you might have missed
By Lauren Huff November 27, 2019 at 03:00 PM EST
Rian Johnson’s modern take on a classic whodunit, Knives Out, features one of the most star-studded casts of the year, but there’s another major character in the film that isn’t of the flesh-and-blood variety: the Thrombey estate.
In the film, the New England manor belongs to mystery novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), and it’s where the majority of the action — including the central mystery surrounding Thrombey’s death — unfolds. The home is filled with all sorts of kooky odds and ends befitting of an eccentric writer, including weird sculptures, massive self-portraits, and a giant circle of knives.
In real life, the home is a Massachusetts estate that has belonged to the same family for more than 100 years, lovingly preserved and barely altered. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Knives Out production designer David Crank spoke with EW about finding the right house, that unforgettable knife display, and the weirdest props you probably didn’t notice (murder scene dioramas, anyone?).
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What were your initial conversations with writer-director Rian Johnson like, and how did you go about finding that house? DAVID CRANK: When I started, Rian and a producer had looked at this home one or two months before. And when I came on, we looked at some others just so we’d have options, but we kept going back to this one. It was a little over 100, 120 years old and it had been lived in by the same family the entire time, and they hadn’t really ever altered it terribly. They kind of updated it, but they hadn’t changed it. So it still had all of the great-grandfather’s things in it. So the house had a huge amount of personality just on its own. And when Rian and I first talked, the biggest thing that he had to say was that the house was a reflection of the writer’s mind, and that’s the strongest piece of advice he gave me, and we kind of went from there.
Did you pull from any particular films or shows for inspiration? Well, we did watch Sleuth, that was one that Rian wanted me to watch from the beginning. There were things about that that we liked, that we used as a reference. I think that was one that had a display of the guy’s books in the background. But the script was so wonderful. And from the script you got to pick those things, kind of build them yourself, which was a lot of fun. But we really considered each thing separately, we weren’t trying to lift directly from [another work].
Did you have to build any part of the house? We used the first floor of the house and the exterior, and then we built the second floor and the third floor on the stage, because there were issues of the size of the hallways and stuff upstairs. It wasn’t easy to get a company up to it. And then we kind of based [the new floors] on the architecture of the house and kind of ran with it, so it got kind of crazier as you went up each floor.
What was the hardest of the house’s odds and ends to source? I don’t know that there was any one thing. We made a lot of things. And often we’d find something interesting, and then that would kind of spark another thing. For instance, there’s a bar in the study scene. That was a giant dollhouse that set decorator David Schlesinger had found, and we didn’t know what to do with it, but it was too good of a price to pass up. You know, from that, we then made it into a bar. It was a very corporate thing to do with a child’s toy. [Laughs]
I have to ask about that giant display of knives. How did that come about? It was in the script that there was a knife display, but it didn’t really describe it very much. And so it was a thing that grew out of conversations and making different prototypes. And we were having trouble because we didn’t really know exactly how we wanted to use it, because it wasn’t really stated in the script, from what I remember. Rian one time described it to me as a score. And that’s kind of when the idea took shape, but I can’t take total credit for it.
CLAIRE FOLGER/LIONSGATE
The house has so much going on in it, but what’s one detail of the set that maybe the audience wouldn’t necessarily notice but that you just love? The art director [Jeremy Woodward], one of his projects was figuring out the entire canon of [Harlan Thrombey’s] work from decade to decade to decade, like four decades’ worth. And he designed the settings of how each of the book jackets looked, and how they changed from decade to decade. And they were just kind of around, there wasn’t one big display of them, but it was that kind of detail we got to figure out. So, beyond one special thing, it was just that we had enough time that we were able to add a lot of things like that that built [Harlan’s] character, and trying to reflect his mind in this house.
What was the absolute weirdest thing that was created for the house? One thing that David Schlesinger and his crew kind of made which was quite fun, was we had these dioramas that were in the library, and they were [portraying] terrible little murder scenes. They weren’t [part of the plot] so much as things that were used to kind of fill out Harlan’s personality and his interest in mystery crime writing, but those were quite fun.
This isn’t a question so much as it is an observation, but the film definitely portrays the house as if it’s its own character. Yeah, I think that was very much thanks to Rian. I mean, it’s interesting when you have that much of a movie happening in one place. It’s got to take on a life of its own or it will get boring really fast. So you really need to make sure that it was always active and interacting with people in the film. It has to be as much a part of them as the background.
CLAIRE FOLGER/LIONSGATE
Knives Out, which stars (deep breath!) Plummer, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Ana de Armas, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, and more, is in theaters now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.