| “ | I want to do something that will be mentioned in the same breath as the Mona Lisa. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron's most famous quote. |
| “ | In the real world, you need more than a neat, little detective story. You need evidence. And you’ve got… nothing. Wanna take that to the cops? You wanna take it to the courts? You pick your poison. Anywhere you go, it’s going to be your word against mine. How do you think that’s gonna go? I think it’s gonna go about like it went for Andi. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron bragging about how he will get away with his crimes. |
| “ | Nobody wants you to break the system itself. But that is what true disruption is. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron's philosophy on disruption theory. |
Miles Bron is the main antagonist of the 2022 Netflix mystery film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the second installment in Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out film series.
He is a billionaire tech entrepreneur and the CEO of Alpha Industries who ousted his business partner Cassandra "Andi" Brand from the company over the experimental fuel alternative Klear. To prevent Andi from eventually exposing him, Bron killed her to hide evidence that would give her back control of the company.
He was portrayed by Edward Norton, who also played Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear, Derek Vinyard in American History X, Jack Teller in The Score, Steve Frazelli in The Italian Job, Eric Byer in The Bourne Legacy and Nova in Alita: Battle Angel.
Personality[]
| “ | His dock doesn’t float. His wonder fuel is a disaster. His grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best. He didn’t design the puzzle boxes. He didn’t write the mystery. Et voilà! It all adds up. The key to this entire case! And it was staring me right in the face. Like everyone in the world, I assumed Miles Bron was a complicated genius. But why? Look into the clear center of this Glass Onion... Miles Bron is an idiot! | „ |
| ~ Benoit Blanc about Miles Bron in his denouncement concluding he was the mastermind of both murders. |
Miles Bron is an ambitious and iconoclastic mastermind who a very determined mind.
At first Miles appeared has never settled for anything less than wanting to be credited for something innovative and revolutionary that would change the world. However, despite this, Miles is a narcissist at his center and puts on a facade to cover up his true personality: he is childish, conceited, unimaginative, short-sighted, cowardly, and— above all else— remarkably stupid.
It soon became clear that Miles' ideas have proven to spell volatile consequences for the world, and are nonsensical and mindless at best. This is particularly demonstrated when he sends absurd ideas via a fax machine to Lionel. He has ridden off the coattails of his business partner and Alpha co-founder Cassandra Brand to give off the impression he was a brilliant and innovative technological entrepreneur when in reality Miles is the polar opposite.
Furthermore, Miles exerts far-reaching political and financial influence - having won the favour of his friends by bankrolling their careers, and he later uses this as leverage against them in what can only be perceived as an example of moral cowardice. By threatening their careers, Miles compels the Disruptors to perjure themselves in order to protect their interests. Miles' grip over his fellow Disruptors is tight enough that up until his reputation is irreparably tarnished, they refuse to testify against him out of fear of the consequences.
Since he was willing to blackmail his friends and ruin their reputations if they didn't follow his orders, it shows that Miles has a very shallow depth of care for his friend circle, and is observed to be very ungrateful. Miles threw Andi under the rug in order to take full credit for her conception of the company, and was willing to even murder his other friends if it meant covering up his tracks, just as he did to Duke when he learned of Andi's "suicide”. When he framed himself as the victim, Miles had no qualms about paying Blanc a billion dollars to let another of his friends take the fall for the alleged attempt on his life, insinuating he would turn on them without hesitation if it meant saving his own skin.
A large facet of his character is that he pretends to be a know-it-all when he really has contributed nothing original to society, much less meaningful, and has always stolen ideas from others. He sells a lie of meritocracy by staging delusions of grandeur and radiates a high opinion of himself in order to trick people into thinking he is a complex genius. Miles seems to never have had a fully original idea that he came up with all by himself. To list a few examples, he took credit for the conception of Alpha from Andi; hired other people to do his bidding such as creating the invitation puzzles for his murder mystery party and writing the script for the mystery; he steals the idea from Benoit Blanc to use the island's power outage in order to commit his attempted murder on "Andi", and he is only reminded to burn the evidence of his crimes after Lionel questions why he still kept it in the first place.
The short-sighted limits of Miles's imagination, knowledge, and creativity are demonstrated further in other ways. Miles also has a tendency to use a lot of malapropisms, whether it is making up words ("inbreathiate", "predefinite"), or misusing them ("reclamation", "infraction point", "circumspective"), likely in a substantial effort to appear smarter than he actually is. When committing his murder on Andi, he stupidly risked not only using his very expensive and conspicuous supercar as a getaway vehicle for his crime but also staked his entire career murdering someone after a very important court case in the public light.
For a wealthy person, Miles is not smart with his money and can be described as profligate. Adding onto the fact he greenlit an experimental hydrogen fuel, more subtle hints at his wanton spending include making short-sighted investments such as a low-tide dock, and expensive articles of artwork. An example of this is when Miles hangs Mark Rothko's painting "Number 207" upside down, reflecting his superficial appreciation of art. He also makes very questionable decisions with his wealth, such as purchasing a low-tide dock which is not very efficient or practical and paying money to airlift a car on an island with no roads. Ultimately, his incessant need to show off and flaunt his flamboyant luxuries leads to his undoing. He openly discloses the secret to his complicated security system, and this is used to contribute to his downfall later with the Mona Lisa's destruction.
Biography[]
In 2010, Miles Bron formed a friendship with Cassandra "Andi" Brand, who introduced him to her circle of friends: amateur model Birdie Jay, professional gamer Duke Cody, soccer mom Claire Debella, and substitute teacher Lionel Toussaint, later known as the "Disruptors". Initially met with disdain, Miles managed to gain their trust by helping launch their respective careers: Birdie's fashion brand, Duke's YouTube channel & thriving Twitch platform, Claire's endorsement that secured her a seat on the city council, and Lionel's promotion to a chemist within his company. Eventually, Miles joined forces with Andi in founding Alpha Industries, a brainchild that Andi conceived on a napkin. The company was a success, making them billionaires. However, while Andi was the true visionary and brains behind the company, Miles was a scapegoat who took all the credit for her ideas.
After discussing hydrogen fuel alternatives with a Norwegian scientist, Miles patented his own experimental hydrogen fuel "Klear" despite Andi's concerns over its safety. When she threatened to take half the company, Miles filed a lawsuit and used his political influence over his friends to manipulate them into perjuring themselves, making them look sympathetic to a jury. They felt pressured to comply since all their reputations were at risk; Claire had signed a bill that would authorize Klear, Lionel was credited as the chief developer of the fuel and was under pressure to use Klear for manned space missions, and Birdie was under scrutiny for financing a sweatshop tied to Alpha. The lawsuit centered on Miles' false claim of owning the intellectual property foundational to the company, disregarding the fact that Andi had actually written the idea on a napkin, the sole physical evidence supporting her case. However, as Andi failed to locate the napkin, she lacked sufficient evidence, ultimately allowing Miles to successfully remove her from Alpha.
Two months later, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, Andi did find the napkin and gave an ultimatum to the Disruptors via e-mail to renounce their perjury, showing off the napkin which was concealed in an envelope. Lionel forwarded the e-mail to Miles by fax, so Miles traveled to Andi's house with the intent to kill her. Miles laced her coffee as they sat down and talked (likely under a ruse to apologize or offer compensation), and then placed her body in her running car inside the garage, making it appear as a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. As he left the crime scene with the envelope, he narrowly avoided getting into a car accident with Duke, who coincidentally headed to confront Andi about the email. Duke thought nothing of this later other than circumstance and appeared to forgive Miles, though later he admitted the encounter had been a near-death experience for him.
During this time, Miles engaged in an affair with Duke's girlfriend, Whiskey, which started during her birthday celebration in New York. However, it was later revealed that Duke orchestrated the affair as a ploy to manipulate Miles into securing him a late-night position at Alpha Newscast. Additionally, Miles obtained the iconic Mona Lisa painting from the financially struggling Louvre in France, having taken a short-term loan to do so.
After two weeks, Miles extended an invitation to the Disruptors for a murder-mystery weekend party on his secluded private island in Greece called the Glass Onion. The island was named after the bar where he initially met all of them and featured a magnificent glass palace as its centerpiece. Unbeknownst to Miles, Andi's identical twin sister, Helen Brand, had learned of Andi's demise and suspected foul play. She hired detective Benoit Blanc to investigate, arranging for Helen to attend the party disguised as Andi. Bron questioned Blanc about his presence on the island, as he wasn't invited, but brushed it off as a joke planned by one of his friends to invite a real master detective for his murder-mystery game.
Later that evening, Blanc intentionally spoiled Miles' planned murder mystery before it even began, justifying that he suspected one of the Disruptors would use the party to target and kill Miles to secure their own reputations. However, Blanc's true objective was to uncover evidence implicating one of them in Andi's death, suspecting one of the Disruptors killed her to protect Miles and themselves. Later, when Duke was notified on his phone of the real Andi's suicide via Google Alert, he privately showed the article to Miles, leveraging the implied threat of exposing it and Miles' involvement in her murder to blackmail him into securing the Alpha News position for him. Realizing he had to kill Duke now to cover up his involvement, Miles swiftly took Duke's pistol, filled his whiskey glass with pineapple juice (knowing Duke was deathly allergic), and passed it to him. Duke tragically succumbed to a fatal allergic reaction in front of his horrified friends.
After Lionel called the police, Miles lied that Duke accidentally grabbed his glass and feigned suspicion of the other Disruptors. Faking concern for his own safety, Miles anxiously fled after a coordinated island-wide power outage, planned as part of the murder mystery party. In the confusion, Miles began hunting down "Andi". He discovered her outside talking to Blanc and shot her with the pistol. He didn't confirm the death, however, and Helen survived with a notebook in her jacket that blocked the bullet. They faked Andi's death using hot sauce to simulate that she was shot.
Blanc, now convinced that Miles was the true mastermind of Andi's murder, reveals his suspicions in a denouncement. Realizing that Miles didn't construct the elaborate invitations, had paid someone else to write the planned murder mystery for him, and his consistent misuse and invention of words, Blanc concluded with certainty that Miles Bron was, in fact, terminally stupid. Blanc outlined the evidence that led him to conclude that Miles was the killer, as he realized from Duke that Miles would have been the first suspect at the crime scene, and pointed out discrepancies in Miles' alibi, as he attended Whiskey's birthday party in New York despite previously claiming to have been in Greece for six months and stayed there since the pandemic. Blanc then realized the blackout planned by Miles was an idea directly stolen from him, echoing their earlier metaphorical conversation about "placing a loaded gun on the table and turning off the lights", leaving him completely dumbfounded by the sheer depths of Bron's lack of originality.
After Helen reveals she survived and has discovered the napkin in Miles' office with the envelope, Miles burns the napkin and smugly dismisses the evidence as circumstantial (he says "circumspective", giving more credence to his backward vocabulary) and that it would not be justifiable in court. His hold over his fellow Disruptors dissuades them from standing up to him, until a hopeless Helen erupts in anger, smashing Miles' glass sculptures, and inciting the other Disruptors to rebel. Although Miles is initially unfazed, he becomes increasingly alarmed when more expensive, high-value, and irreplaceable belongings are being destroyed. Helen then ignites a fire and introduces a substance of Klear to create a catastrophic hydrogen explosion that blows up the Glass Onion. The fire rages, and to further ruin Miles, she disables the security system protecting the Mona Lisa, exposing it to the flames as it burns to ash.
Following the explosion, Helen, Miles, and the Disruptors manage to survive and flee from the Glass Onion. As a consequence of both Miles and Klear being implicated in the destruction of a globally renowned painting, the remaining members of the Disruptors opt to testify against Miles just as the police arrive. Defeated, he slumps down beside his former friends and curses them.
It is unknown what exactly happens to Miles after, although it can be reasonably speculated that he was arrested and that the testimony would have removed Miles as CEO of Alpha and placed him in jail for the murders of both Andi and Duke, as well as the attempted murder of Helen. Even if Miles managed to evade any legal repercussions due to his wealth, his reputation and legacy would still suffer irreparable damage from the Mona Lisa's destruction, ironically fulfilling his earlier desire to be forever linked to the famous painting.
Quotes[]
| “ | Okay, look, I know you guys think I'm a hippie, but can we just take a second and fully inbreathiate this moment together? | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron introducing his friends to the island, and also the first clue to his unintelligence. |
| “ | If you want to shake things up, you start with something small. You break a norm, or an idea, or a convention, some little business model. But you go with things that people are kind of tired of anyway. Everybody gets excited because you’re busting up something that everyone wanted broken in the first place. That’s the infraction point. That’s the place where you have to look within yourself and ask, “Am I the kind of person who will keep going?” Will you break more things? Break bigger things? Are you willing to break the thing that nobody wants you to break? Because at that point, people are not gonna be on your side. They’re gonna call you crazy. They’re gonna say you’re a bully. They’re gonna tell you to stop. Even your partner will say, “You need to stop.” Because as it turns out, nobody wants you to break the system itself. But that is what true disruption is. And that is what unites all of us. We all got to that line and crossed it. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron's explanation on disruption theory, also foreshadowing his demise. |
| “ | We got three days to bask in the sun, swim in the Ionian Sea, eat good food and wine, and enjoy each other’s company. But alongside and underneath the partay, you’ve been charged with a serious task. Because tonight, in this very room, a murder will be committed. My murder. You will have to closely observe the crime. Consider what you know about each other. Know that across the island, I’ve hidden clues. Some may be helpful, some may misdirect. That’s for you to determine. But if anyone can name the killer, tell me how they achieved the murder, and, most importantly, what was the motive, that person wins our game. Any questions? | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron explaining his murder-mystery party. |
| “ | I'll pay you one billion dollars to tell me which one of them tried to kill me! | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron to Benoit Blanc. |
| “ | Andi used to tell me the truth. Nobody does that now. It's all just fake smiles and agendas and people wanting what they think they're owed. Hating you when you don't give it to them because that's what you're there for. I know it’s probably hard to have sympathy for the poor, tortured billionaire. But… God damn, I miss that bar. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron attempting to earn Benoit Blanc's sympathy. |
| “ | Burned what? I didn’t see anything. Is someone making toast? Uh-huh. Well, did you see this proof, this smoking napkin, Blanc? No. Did anybody? Okay, then wow! Wow! We got some big accusations flying around here. Except, everybody seems to have a very foggy recollection of what they actually saw, and there’s nothing but totally circumspective evidence. So, if this was just us playing my murder mystery game, which we should have been doing all weekend, then Blanc wins an iPad Pro this time. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron smugly admitting to his crimes but bragging about how he will get away with it due to a lack of evidence. |
| “ | Oh, fantastic! Oh, that’s so punk rock! What? You think you’re an alligator? You think you popped me like a gangster? No! You baby! You child! You feel better now? I hope your little bitch tantrum gave you closure ’cause it accomplished nothing! | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron's villainous breakdown to Helen Brand after Klear blows up the Glass Onion. |
| “ | No. No. Gang? We all saw the same thing. We know what happened. Am I right? Oh… you shitheads. | „ |
| ~ Miles Bron's last words following his defeat after his friends turn on him and announce they will testify against him. |
Gallery[]
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Trivia[]
- The character of Miles Bron is an amalgamation of the "tech bro CEO" stereotype. He is a caricature of real-life personas such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as some disgraced entrepreneurs like Elizabeth Holmes. Rian Johnson, however, has been on the record stating Miles is a mix of many uber-rich intellectuals, and not especially inspired by Elon Musk, contrary to popular belief.
- The name "Bron" is phonetically pronounced as "Brawn," which references the well-known "Brains and Brawn" archetype often found in stories featuring a duo composed of an intelligent character and a noticeably less intelligent counterpart. Within the context of Alpha Industries, Andi represents the brains, providing innovative ideas and strategic thinking, while Miles represents the brawn, as he unjustly takes credit for Andi's innovative ideas and achievements.
- Very similar to another villain Norton portrayed, Steve Frazelli in The Italian Job, both characters steal ideas from others that are not their own.
- Glass Onion diverges from the first Knives Out movie in various factors including plot structure and setting. As such, Bron stands in stark contrast to Ransom Drysdale, the killer in the first movie. While Ransom meticulously planned out his crimes and devised clever strategies to conceal them, Miles was foolish and ignorant, with his success owed to either dumb luck, circumstance, or to ideas that he did not come up with himself.
- Incidentally, Edward Norton and Chris Evans, who played Ransom, both portrayed an Avenger in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Norton played Bruce Banner/Hulk, and Evans played Steve Rogers/Captain America.
- There's a popular theory that Miles did not have the actual Mona Lisa in his possession, as it was depicted as being painted on canvas, most obvious when it's burning. The Mona Lisa in real life is painted on wood. Thus, people have speculated that the Louvre loaned Miles a copy, correctly guessing he would not treat the piece with proper respect and would be too ignorant to tell the difference or even that Miles never got in touch with the actual Louvre in the first place.
External Links[]
- Miles Bron on the Knives Out Wiki