One of Wake Up Dead Man‘s filming locations looked very familiar to Rick Astley fans.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, to give it its full and illustrious title, was a bit of a banger, wasn’t it? That Rian Johnson, he knows his way around a whodunnit, and he’s now three for three with the continuing adventures of suave southern sleuth Benoit Blanc. But it appears he also knows his way around ’80s pop star Rick Astley, as one sharp-eyed punter on BlueSky has noticed.
Poet Jay Hulme presumably made the Leonardo DiCaprio snapping at the TV motion when he was watching Wake Up Deadman on Netflix, as he recognised a very distinctive article of architecture.
And Rian Johnson, being a nice guy as well as the director of the best Star Wars movie since 1980, was good enough to confirm Hulme’s observation – Wake Up Dead Man was partly filmed in the same location as the music video for Astley’s seemingly immortal earworm. And although Johnson didn’t specify, the music video was shot in the Harrow Club in London and, hopping over to The Londonist, a quick look confirms it.
Also, if you want a fun bit of trivia to slip into your back pocket, the video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” was directed by Simon West, who went on to direct Con Air and… well, a lot of rubbish, frankly. The Expendables 2 has its moments, though.
Hulme went on to assure everyone that “…I don’t know this because I’m overly familiar with Rock [sic] Astley’s oeuvre, but because I am a strange little freak about old buildings and the window tracery in question is utterly unique and, frankly, geometrically evil.”
And to think, if it weren’t for that idiosyncratic fixation, we’d all be none the wiser. Well played, Mr Johnson – Wake Up Dead Man might be the greatest rickroll of all time.
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