Luther creator Neil Cross reveals that the first victim on Luther: The Fallen Sun was supposed to be a woman. It's pretty common for a Luther project to include a lot of violence in the film. Aside from an abundance of violence, these series of films are known for kickstarting the movie with an opening murder of a man. While Cross thought a female first victim would be better, he shut off this idea after Netflix wanted him to rethink his plan.
Neil Cross shared the reason why he wanted to have a woman as the opening murder in the film. He explained to The Independent,
“It’s been mentioned before that people are uncomfortable with the victimisation of women in Luther – not unfairly. The odd thing, though, is that, if one were to do the maths, there are many, many more male victims in Luther than there are women. But for reasons I fear to interrogate too deeply, the female victims resonate and scare more deeply. So, there was a defiant part of me in the first draft of this, which was, ‘. . . the victim is going to be a woman because that’s more frightening.’”
After he expressed his interest to make the first victim a female, Netflix wanted him to think over his decision. He said,
“And that’s the one moment where Netflix said, ‘Do you want to think about this a bit?’ And I did say, ‘Well, it’ll be less scary.’ I worried that it might be. But actually, they were right.’”
Andy Serkis as the Villain on Luther: The Fallen Sun
One of the biggest challenges for Cross was coming up with bad guys for the film. At first, the British novelist and scriptwriter doesn’t have a clue on who to cast as Idris Elba’s villain. Not until the idea of onboarding Andy Serkis as the film’s villain was brought up. Rather than casting someone who can be intimidating to Elba, they cast someone who gives off the vibe of being a psychopath. He said,
“The biggest problem with the bad guys is how do you find somebody whose presence poses a believable threat to Idris Elba? It’s not an easy thing to do so I thought we had a really big uphill struggle ahead of us. But in a meeting with Jamie [Payne, director] and Idris, I said: ‘Do we have a list of actors?” and Idris went, ‘Oh, we should get Andy Serkis.’ And that was that.”
Luther: The Fallen Sun is now available on Netflix.