'Luther': Why last night's episode made the creator choke up

There are scenes that Luther creator Neil Cross writes that frighten him: “I’ve spent essentially 40 years of being scared of having someone under my bed, or having a bogeyman in the roof, or any one of a million horrors that I’ve visited on poor, innocent people in the course of Luther,” he tells EW. But there are also scenes he pens that make him teary-eyed: “When I write scenes of intense camaraderie and friendship, because I think that’s something that we all long for and aspire to, I tend to choke myself up,” he says. “So I went wrote that scene in [last night’s episode] where Luther hears clear evidence of Ripley’s fundamental goodness and loyalty, it made me feel very emotional. It makes me feel very emotional now when I watch it. I talk often about a kind of great, almost classical wound that Idris [Elba] gives the character — that John Luther is a wounded presence. This wound is caused so often by what he’s witnessed — by betrayal, and murder, and unkindness, and depravity — and all the man is looking for is love. And in that moment, he’s got proof positive of the evidence of love. You can see on Idris’ face how hard it hits the character. It’s a great, great moment.”

In tonight’s third installment of the four-episode third season, Luther and Ripley (Warren Brown) begin to chase a vigilante killer, played by Da Vinci’s Demons‘ Elliot Cowan. Watch them come face-to-face in our sneak peek below. Cross sees the character, Tom Marwood — who’s named after the famed 19th century British executioner William Marwood — as a kind of mirror image of Luther. “They have similar motivations and, in many ways, they have kind of similar methods,” he says. “There’s that great scene between Indiana Jones and Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Belloq says, ‘I am a shadowy reflection of you,’ and Indy says, ‘Now you’re getting nasty.’ Luther and Marwood have a very similar relationship, I think. It would take just a nudge to push either into the other’s psychological space. So that means in the end, Luther has to finally, finally make a choice about what kind of person he actually is.”