Actor Tom Ellis is used to working on TV across the pond in England. He was a longtime regular on a show that became an iconic soap opera in Britian called EastEnders. In America he is best known for the short lived USA show Rush that is until the devil came calling in the guise of Lucifer Morningstar the lead role in Fox's much protested new show Lucifer.
The 37 year old actor from Wales had this to say according to Variety about choosing the role, without thinking that it might stir up protest " I think I was wonderfully naive about that, actually. I read the script and literally,four or five pages in I thought this is something I really wanna do, because it was so funny. So I didn't think, I suppose, about the gravity of playing this character or what that means to a lot of people. But obviously since accepting the role and doing it, yes,certain groups have come forward to express their displeasure about this. I always find it interesting when people comment on stuff they haven't seen. It says more about them than about what we're doing."
There have been many complaints that Lucifer is glamorizing the devil by making him a LA club owner with a slick life. Many of these complaints have come from conservative groups who really don't have much of a sense of humour. One million moms has been very vocal in protest of the show and even threatened to go after it's sponsors. On a lighter note when asked about cultural differences in working on a US television show in comparison to a British one he replied "The volume of episodes and the size of everything. When we were shooting the pilot, it was 18 days. We would close down Hollywood Boulevard for five days to do these night shoots, and I'm like, this is insane, I can't believe this is happening. Since working in the States I've had a lot of pinch me moments."
The irony is that Lucifer, when boiled down to it's core, is a procedural and Fox could use a new one, no one knows how much life Bones has left and Sleepy Hollow is ratings challenged. A smart new procedural with a sense of humour could be just what the doctor ordered for the network . According to Wikipedia, Lucifer owes it's smart, funny tone to it's comic book source Neil Gaiman's The Sandman
