According to Deadline, Willem Dafoe has hopped the turnstiles and stepped onboard Kenneth Branagh’s remake of Murder On The Orient Express, joining Daisy Ridley, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penelope Cruz, Josh Gad, Judi Dench, Michael Peña, Leslie Odom Jr., and Lucy Boynton—all of whom are suspects in the murder of a man whose real name is definitely Ratchett, played by Johnny Depp. Brilliant detective Hercule Poirot will be played Branagh himself, presumably because he couldn’t trust anyone else to properly solve Agatha Christie’s famously twisty murder plot.
Dafoe will reportedly be playing an undercover detective named Gerhard Hardman, which is a slight twist on the original story’s private detective Cyrus Hardman. To say too much would spoil a very old and very well-known murder mystery, but the Hardman character in the original story is definitely not the lone killer responsible for committing the murder. (Wink.)