Lucifer star Tom Ellis talks musical episode, playing his own evil twin, and season 6

Lucifer season 5 drops on Netflix tomorrow, and it’s pulling out all the stops. Star Tom Ellis tells us what to expect from this crazy new crop of episodes:

The fifth season of Lucifer drops on Netflix tomorrow! By all accounts, this is going to be a wild one. There’s a black-and-white episode, a musical episode, a meta episode where a showrunner of a fictional show about the devil gets murdered…they’re doing it all, including addressing issues of systemic racism raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. And all this on a show about Satan running a nightclub in LA; the series has come a long way since beginning its life on Fox back in 2016.

And star Tom Ellis is going to spend part of the season playing Lucifer’s evil(er) twin brother Michael. “It was a new challenge to me, that’s for sure,” Ellis told Backstage. “What I realized is that I’ve played Lucifer for five years; it’s very easy for me to step in and out of Lucifer’s skin. Playing a new character—it messed with my head a little bit. For a long time, I felt like a fraud to my friends and colleagues. But it was nice to think about a different character for a while. I had a certain set of rules that I had to work in. We’re always set up against time when we’re shooting. There’s so much to pack in, and we don’t have a lot of time. So in terms of Lucifer and Michael being different, I had to go old-school in that and figure out physicality and voice and how a character walks, as opposed to any sort of transformative prosthetics.”

Fans can decide for themselves whether he pulls it off:

As for that musical episode, Ellis told Da Man that it was “far and away the most fun I have had doing anything on a set ever.” That’s a high bar. “Singing and dancing makes me very happy, so when we filmed on a high school football field with 100 background dancers to the music of Queen, let’s just say I felt like I’d won a competition to live out my dream.”

In short, Netflix isn’t messing around with the fifth season of Lucifer, which is coming in two halves: the first crop of episodes drop on Friday, August 21, and the second set will follow later.

There was a time when everyone, including Ellis, thought that this fifth season would be its last, but Lucifer is nothing if unpredictable. The show already made the jump from Fox to Netflix a couple years back, and then, in the middle of filming season 5, Netflix asked if the creators would be up for a sixth.

“I’d planned to spend this season in my own grieving process,” Ellis told The Guardian. “And then, right towards the end, literally as we’d already devised how we would end our show, we had a call from Netflix saying: ‘Would you like to go another season?’”

Lucifer had already come back from the dead once. What’s another go-round? “I know we’re the Lazarus of TV shows, but this is definitely going to be the final season,” Ellis insisted.

We’ll cross that bridge over a lake of fire when we come to it.

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