When Lucifer left Earth at the end of Season 4 to return some half needed to hell, the immediate question for Season 5 became: Well, what the hell now? For four years is the point of Lucifer was that the devil was running amok in Los Angeles. What is Lucifer without Lucifer in LA?
Co-showrunners Joe Henderson and Ildy Modrovich knew they would need something big to bring the devil back into the game. Fortunately, the DC comics are true Lucifer is based holding some answers. Enter: the archangel Michael, the twin brother of Lucifer.
** SPOILER WARNING: This story contains spoilers for Lucifer Season 5. **
Jawis, the Michael of the DC Comics universe – friendly, angelic, blonde – is a very different Michael than the one viewers meet in Lucifer Season 5. For one, Michael from the show has Lucifer’s black hair and sharp, dark eyes, because he, like Lucifer, is played by Tom Ellis. That, of course, is the genius of the storyline: more than his love for Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), the only thing Lucifer could bring back from hell would be his own ego in learning from someone, especially his brother, was to personify him. And it turns out that imagining the devil is an often sacred task – both for Michael and the actor behind him.
“I felt like a fraud facing people I’ve worked with for five years, and acted like someone else,” Ellis admitted to SYFY WIRE prior to the series’ Season 5 premiere Aug. 21 on Netflix . ‘It was such a strange feeling to begin with, because I’m so used to stepping into Lucifer’s skin and just, with a flick of a switch, going in and out of it. [Playing Michael] was strange to me, to be honest. I felt a massive fraud a lot of the time. ‘
At first, Michael is ready to play the long game, and sees himself in a mirror, completely naked, practicing the signature of Lucifer’s British charm and dirty grin. (“Hello, detective.”) But just two episodes into the season, audiences learn what Michael really is: a flawed, American-accented version of Lucifer, who somehow has an even bigger chip on his shoulder.
It has to be said: There’s a strange, unintentional cognitive dissonance coming out of Ellis’ mouth when listening to an almost nasal American accent. Everyone who has seen Lucifer before is accustomed to a smooth, English timbre – so charming it must be skewed, but somehow it fails to be. Rachael Harris, who plays Lucifer’s voice of wisdom, Dr. Linda Martin, can not laugh when he talks about Ellis’ American accent. She tells SYFY WIRE that she could not help but have fun with Ellis (naturally, of course) at the beginning, calling the voice ‘unnatural’ because she and everyone else had been listening to Ellis’ normal voice for years.
“I wanted to give him a standard, let’s say, East Coast American, educated dialect, I think,” Ellis explains. ‘That was where I just started it to begin with. My main thing was that I just wished he was really different than Lucifer. In the short time we have when we switch between the two characters on set, I have no time to go back and do great prosthetic makeup things and all that kind of stuff.
That he had to find a way to switch over and over between the two characters and really distinguish them, even when he was not talking. Sure, Michael soon stops imagining Lucifer and embraces his own style – turtlenecks for days – but Ellis and the Lucifer team adjust to other key factors: a hobbled shoulder and a tight posture to contrast with the confidence that Lucifer radiates.
“I had to go to old school like you would in the theater and just think about physicality … think about the way he behaves and the way he walks,” Ellis says. He worked alongside director Sherwin Shilati and co-showrunner Modrovich to develop Michael’s stitch. ‘I went into the room [Shilati and Modrovich] and just said, ‘This is what I think,’ and got out of my chair and started doing things. I said that Lucifer is basically this big, open character. When I say open, I also mean physically open to people.
“While Michael, I wanted to physically shut him down and make him much more of a calmer character in that sense. That’s where this shoulder thing started, “Ellis continues.” Then we started talking about the evolution of that and why he would have this. Maybe his wing when he comes out on that side is a little damaged and whatever. “We’re actually going through the second half of the season to explain why Michael tends to be that way.”
That kind of collaboration after all is what makes television so exciting, Ellis says. “The beauty of telling stories when you write a TV show is that you often leave the trail when you do,” he explains. “There are no answers … You start connecting the dots without even knowing where they are going.”
The first eight episodes of Lucifer Season 5 is now available on Netflix.
See SYFY WIRE for more Lucifer Coverage of season 5 next week.
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