Hargadon says they tried a “very large muscle suit,” but quickly realized that the proportions wouldn’t work, even if it wasn’t quite as large as Bá’s original vision for the character. The earliest efforts at bringing Luther to life were much closer to the massive body from the comics. Tom is very fit and everything, but Luther in the comics is so hulking.” “But at the same time, certain things didn’t work on actual human people in the same way. “We really wanted to be respectful to the story and the beautiful images created by Gabriel Bá,” says costume designer Christopher Hargadon.
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So the creative team behind the series set about making a gorilla body that would achieve the same effect in a more toned-down way. “And then when you start doing it, you go, Wait. “You go, Okay, we’re gonna build an ape suit,” he says. But because Blackman felt those details made it “maybe difficult to take him seriously,” bringing Luther to life on live-action television posed a host of new problems. In the Über-stylized Umbrella Academy comics, Luther is twice as tall and four times as wide as any of his siblings, and his gorilla body is covered in thick blue hair. “And maybe he did the same thing, in reverse - used simian DNA for Luther.” As Blackman sees it, even Luther’s initial transformation had to make sense, or at least more so than a hulking blue gorilla sewn onto a man’s head: “In our minds, maybe used human DNA to turn Pogo into what he was,” he says. This is nuts,” says Hopper.īringing this wild concept to life required a team of costume designers and prosthetic manufacturers, who worked together to ensure that this weird monkey-man could appear in Umbrella Academy without breaking the show’s delicate blend of style and realism. This guy is a human head on a gorilla body. “I looked at the comics before I was officially cast, and I was like, Oh, my God. Reginald Hargreeves, grafted his head onto the body of a superstrong space gorilla. This is an alteration from an even wackier explanation in Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s Umbrella Academy comics, in which Luther’s adoptive father, Dr. So it’s not exactly a surprise when, later in the season, a crashing chandelier exposes the hidden story behind Luther’s gargantuan muscles: From the neck down, he’s not a man at all, but a gorilla-man hybrid - and per Pogo, the Hargreeves family’s talking chimpanzee butler, he’s closer to the gorilla side of that spectrum.Ī flashback reveals that Luther’s simian physique came from an experimental serum, deployed as a last-ditch effort to save his life after he took on a dangerous mission alone. I mean weird shredded - so big and oddly proportioned that there’s a clumsiness to Luther’s massive body. I don’t mean “shredded” like your normal superhero, or even like your normal chiseled Hollywood actor (though Tom Hopper is six-foot-five). And if you’re anything like me, your first thought will be: God, that dude is shredded. Photo: Michael Gibson/NetflixĮarly in the first episode of Netflix’s Umbrella Academy, you’ll meet Luther Hargreeves (Tom Hopper), the de facto leader of this team of misfit superheroes.
Tom Hopper as Luther Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy.
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