Luther Season 6: Creator Neil Cross spills on new episodes

It has been the question on every Luther fan’s mind since the final episode of season five in January last year: Will there be another? Creator Neil Cross gives a definitive answer.

It has been the question on every Luther fan’s mind since the final episode of season five in January last year: Will there be another?

Star Idris Elba and creator Neil Cross have skirted around the question whenever asked, both insisting there would be more stories featuring the gritty London cop, but neither willing to commit to what shape or form they would come in.

Finally we can reveal one piece of the Luther puzzle: there will definitely not be a sixth season of the hugely popular crime show.

Luther creator Neil Cross with the show’s star Idris Elba. Picture: Peta Mazey

“There is not going to be a season six — definitively no season six,” Cross tells Insider during a candid chat from his New Zealand home this week. “But Idris, (season five director) Jamie Payne, and I will shortly have some exciting news to share. There’s gonna be more later, but it’s not going to be season six.”

While he wouldn’t confirm it, that “more” is almost certainly going to be at least one movie. Elba has explained in the past that season five perfectly positioned the series to transition to a longer format.

Luther is clearly a character and show that both Elba and Cross are deeply invested in. The latter jokingly explains that he and the Molly’s Game star “joint custody” of the troubled detective.

The show’s continuation has never been about ratings for the BBC, with audiences growing each season. They are the kind of figures producers dream of. What it does come down to is Cross and his determination to tell a compelling and perfectly constructed story rather than making something just for the sake of it.

“We never churned out it like sausages,” he says.

“I’m not casting aspersions on Silent Witness but Silent Witness is on season 80. We never did that. We did the best we could, we went away for a bit, enough time to allow Idris to do other things. None of us ever got a chance to be bored of it. We would do it. Love the process of doing it. I always say Idris and I have joint custody of the character, that we love him, we both love him.”

Cross says he and Elba share joint custody of the character they both love.

This enviable work ethic isn’t something Cross has always laboured under. Indeed at one point in his life he was willing to do almost anything not to work.

“I was expelled from school 15 and I was asked to leave home very shortly thereafter — the two were quite related,” he smiles. “And back in those days, we’re talking kind of mid-80s, I had no interest in doing anything at all with my life or my days. I was allergic to the very notion of work.”

On the dole for seven years, Cross had settled into a routine that involved very little of anything. He was writing — he’d started his first novel at the age of eight and never really stopped — but it was more for fun than anything remotely resembling a career trajectory.

At the beginning of the 1990s, towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s reign and the beginning of John Major’s, being “deliberately out of work” became a lot harder.

“So I kind of thought ‘well, what can I do that involves not working for a few more years?” he laughs.

“So I went to university — it seemed to me an easy way to defer getting a job.”

But like a perfect script, a shocking twist was just around the corner.

Russell Tovey as Nathan Redmond in a scene from Cross’s new thriller The Sister.

“At some point when I was at university, out of nowhere, a miracle — I discovered a work ethic,” he says. “So I really got a lot from university, but primarily this sense that I enjoyed being active, I enjoyed doing stuff. And I kind of made up for those seven years by not stopping since.”

Cross started his career as purely a novelist. His completed all but the final chapter of his first book Mr In-Between before throwing it in a draw for five years before finally finishing it and sending it off to the publisher.

He eventually started dabbling in TV where he wrote for shows such as Spooks and Doctor Who and started to make a name for himself. But it was in 2010 with the birth of Luther that he really started to be noticed. Now the author and screenwriter has a new thriller series hitting the screen that will give audiences their Neil Cross fix as they wait for more news on Luther.

The Sister, which is based on Cross’s 2009 book Burial (a title he is quick to admit he hates), stars Being Human’s Russell Tovey as Nathan, a happily married man who gets an unexpected knock on the door one night. The visitor is a man from his past and he needs Nathan’s help in moving a body.

The four-part series will have you leaving the lights on when you go to bed — just as Cross had hoped.

The four-part series is dark and scary, fulfilling Cross’s initial desire to keep viewers awake at night. With so many thrillers across various platforms these days, Cross explains the secret to instilling fear in those watching.

“In order to write something really scary, I think you’ve got to be scared. And I’m probably the world’s most scared person and I’m scared of everything and so I can, you know, translate that to the screen.”

* The Sister, SBS, Wednesday, 9.30pm

* Luther season five, SBS On Demand