By Rick Marshall, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
Jan. 11—”Wake Up Dead Man,” the third film in writer-director Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” murder mystery franchise, delivered plenty of unexpected twists when it premiered on Netflix in December 2025. It dropped a particularly big surprise on local audiences, however, when the story established that its main character — a young priest played by Josh O’Connor — hailed from Albany.
“With the decision to use a fictional Hudson River Valley town (as the setting for the film), it made sense that Jud was from Albany,” said Rick Heinrichs, production designer on both “Wake Up Dead Man” and its predecessor, 2022’s “Glass Onion.”
The film casts O’Connor as Catholic priest Jud Duplenticy, a former boxer who is exiled to an upstate New York parish after an altercation with a deacon. His new parish is located in the fictional Hudson Valley town of Chimney Rock, and Duplenticy is described early in the story as a “priest from Albany.”
“Rian’s cultural and character references for the ‘Knives Out’ films are specific to the U.S., and initially we weren’t necessarily confining our search to the Northeast to provide the background character for Chimney Rock,” recalled Heinrichs. “This story, however, seemed very much about the past as well as the present, and its lean into gothic horror as well as faith dictated environments with a certain history that felt emotionally resonant with that narrative.”
The desire for a mix of old-town aesthetic and pastoral surroundings for Chimney Rock had Heinrichs’ team researching towns along waterways, where urban centers were often established during colonial times.
“At the same time, a body of water as a religion-based metaphor was becoming more interesting to me as I was developing imagery for the sets,” he said. “With this direction, we were then able to narrow the search down to the Connecticut, Merrimack and Hudson River Valleys, roughly spanning New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont.”
“I created a list of towns from my Google Earth search of those valleys that we sent a scout to for contemporary pictures,” he continued.
With most of the filming expected to take place in and around the U.K., Heinrichs knew that using locations in the U.K. as stand-ins for places in the U.S. doesn’t always pan out, and can be more trouble than it’s worth in the long run. This made finding a U.S.-based location to serve in exterior shots of the town of Chimney Rock an important part of the process in bringing “Wake Up Dead Man” to the screen.
“We were looking all the way up to Albany and had pictures of the downtown areas in Hudson, Catskill, Kingston, and Newburgh to study, (but) the one location that really checked the most boxes on our U.S. river valley town visual character list was Cold Spring, N.Y.,” he said. “Its geographic location on a gradual slope, with a charming, timeless main street leading down to a lovely waterfront opened the views up within the town to the river and the surrounding mountains.”
“It felt very cinematic,” he continued. “All this location was missing was the eponymous ‘Chimney Rock.’ … We provided that missing landmark with visual effects to our establishing shots. We also seamlessly added exterior elements shot on stage in London to shots on location in Cold Spring, as well as vice-versa.”
As for Albany’s presence in the story, Heinrichs indicated that the city’s size and proximity to Chimney Rock/Cold Spring made it both convenient and a supportive story element in establishing the dynamic between Duplenticy and Jefferson Wicks, the current monsignor of the parish, played by Josh Brolin.
“(Albany) is a big enough city to elicit Monsignor Wicks’ resentment about being saddled with this young upstart, but not of a scale that the Archdiocese of New York City would evoke,” explained Heinrichs.
“This is but one example of Rian’s careful calibration of character reveals: the concept of Jud coming from the Archdiocese of New York could work in a broad way, but the contrast of the backstory elements of these two main characters would become too pronounced and possibly cartoony, calling too much attention to itself,” he said.
And because all of these locations in the film — inspired by real places or otherwise — are ultimately fictional, it allowed Johnson to pick and choose which elements of the story’s real-world counterparts to incorporate into his Hudson Valley murder mystery.
“The actual Catholic Diocese of Albany filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, but we are hopeful that the fictional Diocese of Albany continues its important mission, along with Our Lady of Perpetual Grace,” said Heinrichs.
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