TOM ELLIS: SPEAK OF THE DEVIL [IN PRINT]

INTERVIEW BY CLARA SEELY-KATZ

WORDS BY IRVIN RIVERA

Tom Ellis could be really intimidating. I was intimidated when he arrived at Sixty Beverly Hills for our photoshoot. He’s a tall, charming, Welsh man who plays Lucifer Morningstar in the TV show “Lucifer.” He plays the devil, a character painted evil and dark throughout history and across multiple cultures around the globe. But in the show, Tom gave light on the devil’s humanity, he gave the devil layers of soul. After all, Luci means light, and Lucifer means “light-bringer.”

PHOTOGRAPHER: IRVIN RIVERA, FASHION STYLIST: ENRIQUE MELENDEZ, GRAPHICS DESIGN: PHIL LIMPRASERTWONG, GROOMING: LILLY KEYS, PHOTO PRODUCER: LOUISE BARRETTO, LOCATION: SIXTY BEVERLY HILLS, SPECIAL THANKS: AUSTIN MELROSE OF UMBRELLA HOSPITALITY GROUP

The intimidation subsides as soon as you get to know him a bit more. He is devilishly charming by default, but you can also instantly tell his warmth to the people around him and his focus whenever he is working.

It’s delightful to watch Tom play the titular character as he grows with it. His resilience to changes, from the show’s cancellation to Netflix picking it back up, to filming restrictions due to the global pandemic, to handling social media and using it to influence his audience positively, to new projects post Lucifer, absolutely made Tom tougher and better. He’s been through hell and back.

Admiring someone from their TV show and admiring them as an individual, a human separate from their character is different. Tom’s performance on Lucifer is fun, and brilliant, to say the least. But I also admire him as a person, especially on how he uses his platform to positively and proactively influence his audience. His involvement with the Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity and helping to amplify Black voices through “Black Folx” podcast with Brandon Kyle Goodman is really inspiring.

That’s the beauty of sitting down and actually speaking to the person. You peel off the layers and discover a little bit more about their humanity. Our favorite actors are very much like us. They’re humans too. And one of our goals in doing these Collector’s Issues is to present the actors in a different light, to have a sense of their humanity, and to learn a little bit more about the other things that they do aside from their acting portfolio. We hope you enjoy this issue and get inspired by Tom’s story.

So how was your experience filming with all of the COVID-19 restrictions?

How do I phrase this? It was really, really tough. It was like trying to juggle with one arm behind your back. I completely understood all the protocols that had to be put in place to keep people as safe as possible. However, having these very linear rules about how people can be with each other in a space that is supposed to be creative brings up lots and lots of difficulties and frustrations. Ultimately, I couldn't believe that the crew more than anybody could handle it all. The actors, obviously, get some rest from the mask by taking it off to do scenes, but the crew would be in their mask all day, every day. They would have to go and take themselves somewhere else far from the set just to sip water. It was a very trying time. I was just so impressed with all of them and how they just did it without complaining, which was amazing, really.

Do you think there was anything positive you took away from that filming experience? Anything you learned?

I realized that we don't need to use quite as much paper. We've been using a lot more remote tools for things like script amendments since they couldn't be handed out as hard copies. The amount of paper wasted for something like that always bugs me because we don't need to. We don't need to kill off another million trees to print scripts if they can be digital. I noticed more things like that; I realize that you can deal with what we do in a much more environmentally friendly, much more conscientious way. It made me realize that I don't ever really want to shoot on a COVID set again.

Your acting career is only on an upward trajectory. How did you get into acting in the first place?

It was relatively late in my high schooling years when I was 17. I wasn't doing any drama or anything at that point. I was really into sports, I still am, and I wanted to do something working within sports and physiotherapy and sports injury. When I was at a point in my high schooling where I was choosing subjects for what we call "A-levels" in the UK, one of the levels I chose was history. After a couple of weeks, I really wasn't enjoying it, so I went to my tutors and said, I don't want to do this. And they said, Well, you have to do another subject in its place. I didn't know what to do.

Then, my old English teacher, who knew that I was in this position, came to me and said, look, I'm running the theatre studies group. Now, I know you've never done it before, but I think you'd enjoy it. And to be honest with you, I've got twelve girls and one boy, and I need another boy. I was like, well, I'm going to stop you right there. You've got twelve girls and one boy, and we're all 17 and horny; I'm coming to your class. Maybe I got involved for the wrong reasons, but honestly, after a few lessons in theater studies, I realized I really enjoyed it. I found it spoke to me, and I think it was quite apparent to the people in the class and my teachers that it was something that I was quite good at doing. After that, my teacher cast me in the school play, and a friend of mine's mum who used to be an actress came to see it. She called me up the next day and said I saw you in the school play last night, and I think you should think about going to drama school and being an actor. That was the positive encouragement I needed to go for it, and it helped that my drama teacher said the same thing to me later. So, they both helped me audition for drama school, which I went to instead of University. I got a place at the Royal Scottish Academy, and that was that. From there, I did three years of drama school training, and after I graduated, I got work straight away.

"We both love to drink, and I do like the music of Lucifer, all that sort of stuff. We share that kind of affinity for music, and in fact, the music came into the show a little bit because of my love of music."

Lucifer has a vast and robust fanbase, have there been any particularly touching experiences you have had with fans?

The story of what saved our show is my touching fan interaction story. When Lucifer was canceled after season three by Fox, it was our fans that ensured that it would continue. It wasn't until we were initially canceled that I realized quite how much love there was for the show out there. It's funny how it took something like that to have this realization. Even if the show hadn't been picked up for another season after that, the fan's outpouring of love was enough to make me feel better about the whole situation because I was a bit crushed when they pulled the plug on the show. One, because I was thoroughly enjoying playing the character and working with all the people I was working with, but also I'd started to gain the sense that we had begun to grow a fanbase.

In America, the networks are very obsessed with the numbers that come in for who's watching; they like to talk about demographics and who spends money on what to determine what commercials to play and so on. That's how it all works now on commercial television, and because our show was being streamed around the world on other things as well, the numbers that Fox saw were not reflecting how popular the show actually was. We started talking to people in different countries, and people really loved the show, so when fox canceled it, I thought to myself, I don't think people are going to be very happy about this. I just didn't realize quite how many people, and how unhappy. It was a very vindicating moment. Ever since then, I've always said this when I speak to fans, that our fans feel like shareholders in our show. And there's this kind of two-way affinity that I don't think happens for every show.

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LUCIFER Season 5B is now streaming on NETFLIX