The “Luther” Movie Is Getting Serious
A film version of the BBC’s crime series “Luther” is seriously moving forward. Writer-creator Neil Cross is working on the script and, speaking at the launch of the fifth season in London’s Shoreditch district today, series star Idris Elba says he’s committed to bringing the character to the big screen.
The latest four-episode season, which airs in the first week of January in the U.K. and later in the year in the U.S., stands apart from previous outings in that it was designed from the get go to segue into a feature film. He tells
Variety:
“We are really advancing on getting a movie version [of the show] up on the screen. Neil is beavering away on writing this thing, and I think the remit for the film is to scale it up. ‘Luther’ has all the ingredients to echo those classic [neo-noir] films of the 90s like ‘Seven’ and ‘Along Came a Spider,’ and I think what we would like to do is use that blueprint to create ‘Luther’ the film. It will be more murder, more Volvos, more frowning Luther… essentially we just want to try to take it to a much bigger audience and scale, and perhaps international as well.”
Elba also spoke about the new season which sees the return of Ruth Wilson as evil genius and romantic interest Alice Morgan who is a wild card in the series while Luther hunts down a dangerous antagonist:
“In this particular season there is one antagonist… so many things fall out of that and it becomes a very complex web, and Alice turns up and she isn’t here to give me Christmas cards, she’s here to give me a headache. What is really special about this particular season is it is four episodes in one movie, and it starts to unfold, and unfold, and unfold… it is pretty scary.”
Speaking about her role, Wilson says: “She creates chaos… She is always off the rails. [Alice doesn’t] stick to any rules; she’s always trying to pull Luther to the dark side, and it works quite frequently… but she’s vulnerable and she needs his help.”
Elba adds that he’s comfortable with such an extended period between seasons as he things everyone involved prefers making it “in bite sizes” due to the dark nature of the material and the show’s audience and fans have grown and adapted to that.