Star Wars: The Last Jedi star Andy Serkis will once again be on bad guy duty in the upcoming Netflix outing, Luther: The Fallen Sun. Going up against Idris Elba’s intrepid detective will certainly be no easy feat, and Serkis has now teased to Total Film the darkness with which his villain, tech billionaire David Robey, will attack the former detective chief inspector.
"When I first read the script, I almost wanted to throw it in the bin and have a shower. I don’t think I’ve come across anything quite as dark for a long time. And I thought: ‘In fact, do I really actually at this point in the world and time and my life, want to go down this particular rabbit hole of something that’s so hard to fathom in humanity?'"
Revealed in the report, Robey has in fact come up against John Luther before, but been ignored. Something that has enraged the sadistic entrepreneur, who will now use all the surveillance and other technological tricks at his disposal to torture and manipulate Elba’s returning lead character.
"If you and I had a big secret that we want no one to know, he loves the idea that he can be like: 'I know what that is. Come over and do this for me,'" Idris Elba explains regarding the twisted relationship between Luther and Robey.
In Luther: The Fallen Sun, the epic continuation of the award-winning television saga reimagined for film, a gruesome serial killer is terrorizing London while brilliant but disgraced detective John Luther (Idris Elba) sits behind bars. Haunted by his failure to capture the cyber psychopath who now taunts him, Luther decides to break out of prison to finish the job by any means necessary.
Andy Serkis’ Villain Will Tap into our Fears Surrounding the Internet & Technology
Luther creator Neil Cross returns to write Luther: The Fallen Sun, and reveals how David Robey and his particular brand of villainy will tap into ongoing fears and concerns surrounding the internet and our ever-growing reliance on technology.
"Robey really just comes from this tension between morality and ethics. True morality is the kind of behavior that you exhibit when you know that nobody is watching. But we’ve ceded lots of that private behavior to the semi-private forum of the internet,” Cross explains. “The things of which we are ashamed, the things we think that we’re ashamed of thinking, people that would have lived isolated lives but possibly never expressing their desires or their anxieties – or their interests, shall we say? – they find communities. I’m terrified by the idea that somebody, in fact, is watching.”
Thus, Cross will use John Luther as a way to assuage his own personal fears. "But however broad our canvas is, it’s always going to be this very particular sense that the monster could be coming for you next," he continues. "In a weirdly Freudian fashion, I’ve made up a modern, Arthurian knight-errant who can come along and slay these dragons for me."
Directed by Jamie Payne, written by Neil Cross, and starring Idris Elba as DCI John Luther alongside Cynthia Erivo, Andy Serkis , Dermot Crowley, Jess Liaudin, Lauryn Ajufo, and Natasha Patel, Luther: The Fallen Sun is scheduled to be released in March 2023, by Netflix.