Hell Yeah! Tom Ellis Explains How ‘Lucifer’ is Heating Up This Week (VIDEO)

With one week left before its first-season finale, Lucifer is getting all hot and bothered. Monday’s episode not only opens our usually egotistical anti-hero’s eyes to the deadliest side of Satan worship, it also reveals how even former denizens of the underworld can get their hearts broken. Here, leading man Tom Ellis previews the fateful episode and, as usual, proves to be as charming as sin.

This week’s episode and next week’s season finale work clearly go hand-in-hand.
They are very much a two-parter.

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And the idea of bringing Lucifer face-to-face with modern day Satanists is kind of amazing considering what he finds.  The contrast shows the cracks in this guy and how misunderstood he really is.
[Laughs] I know! It was such a fun episode in a strange way because the stakes are high—the stakes have gotten really high by this point in the series—but also Lucifer is really in a perplexed, despondent, paranoid place. Then to be faced with these kind of [Satanists], these people kind of sum up everything that he’s so frustrated with about how people perceive him. I loved the way it played out. I just thought it was great.

And it also speaks to the shame that he might face if Chloe (Lauren German) ever acknowledges him as the real Lucifer. The way Satanists see him could be how she would see him.
Yeah! And I think that is half of the beauty of this show. She still doesn’t buy the fact that he is, and she actually accepts him as something else, something that maybe he always wanted to be. He always says, “I want to be my own man and not be colored with this brush that my dad has made people paint me with.” Yeah, it throws up a lot of interesting questions about the whole notion.

Tom Ellis and Lauren German

Aside from the Satanist story, which plays into the finale, there’s also the ongoing idea that somebody might be using Chloe as a portal to erode your immortality. I just thought it was her innate goodness that was making him more human!
That’s it, isn’t it? Is she being used as a pawn by somebody else? Is she knowledgeable of this? Because she seemingly doesn’t know anything that’s going on. It all feels kind of fuels Lucifer’s despondency and paranoia and we find him basically at his lowest ever, really.

He’s hurting. He feels a little betrayed. He throws some barbs at her about how people that are the closest to you can turn on you… The whole episode works off the idea that the true evil is in man.
Yeah, which is what I love about this show. I’m really happy that people have responded to it in the way they have because there were a few people that had quite a lot to say about it before it came up. [Laughs] I think what I’ve always enjoyed about the show is that it’s not trying to create a massive theological debate. It does throw up a few, like maybe if we all just took responsibility for our own actions, the world might be a better place. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that so, yeah. It’s a gentle satire. [Laughs]

What isn’t gentle is the fight between Lucifer and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside) that goes down this week. It’s the kind of brawl only brothers can have and sets up a cool dynamic in the finale that kind shows what they were like before we met them.
I’m glad you said that because D.B. and I talked a lot when we first started out how we wanted to sort of think about these two characters as brothers that did grow up together and loved each other as brothers and all of those dynamics that goes on in sibling rivalry. The fight they have in the penthouse in [tonight’s] episode is a bigger scale fight of what they had in their bedroom when they were five years old. That’s how we liked to look at it. By virtue of sort of wanting to take that into account, I think it’s given the characters a much richer form than just these two being sort of enemies that don’t like each other.

The fallout also adds a new level to Maze (Lesley-Ann Brandt).
Yes, indeed. And I think it’s surprising for her. I think the interaction with these divine characters, as we call them—Maz and Amenadiel are not of this world either, so when they interact with humanity in the same way that Lucifer did, they encounter things that are surprising to them and feelings that are surprising to them. It’s fun that we now start to explore the journeys of these other characters with humanity.

Without spoiling anything, the hour’s ending is very sad. It seems like dealing with humanity and its flaws and human frailty finally gets Lucifer to that point of, “You know what? I’m done with these people.” He’s almost broken by what happens.
I completely agree. I think where this episode finishes before the finale is the ultimate kind of, “I can’t believe this is happening” for Lucifer.  The one person that his whole experience on Earth hinged on as the season has unfolded has betrayed him. I think that’s something unfathomable for him because he is who he is. It makes him sort of ask himself the question, “Am I just better off in Hell?’

Check out this exclusive clip from this week’s episode, which finds Maz performing the oddest odd job for her boss in an effort to find out what (or who) is making him more human.

Lucifer, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox.