LUCIFER Co-executive producer Mike Costa | photo courtesy Mike Costa
LUCIFER is now airing its first three seasons (the ones that originally ran on Fox) on TNT. The entire six-season run of the series, starring Tom Ellis as the title character, is available on Netflix, which produced and premiered Seasons 4, 5, and 6.
In Part 4 of our exclusive interview with LUCIFER co-executive producer/writer Mike Costa, he tells us what he knows of the show’s meta connections with The CW’s SUPERNATURAL.
Back in LUCIFER’s 2016-2017 first season, series executive producer/show runner Joe Henderson said that there were writing staffers who were watching both SUPERNATURAL (which had Heaven and Hell as places characters went and viewers saw, as well as Lucifer and God as characters) and CASTLE (which had a famous hero, albeit a non-supernatural one, in love with an LAPD detective, who maneuvers his way into working cases with her) to avoid duplication. LUCIFER and SUPERNATURAL even made meta jokes about each other, with the latter’s Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino) joking, “What am I gonna do, move to L.A. and open a nightclub?”
When LUCIFER moved to Netflix, Richard Speight Jr., who played the angel Gabriel on SUPERNATURAL, as well as directed eleven of that series’ episodes, was hired to direct LUCIFER’s Season 4 episode, “Devil Is as Devil Does.” This went so well that Speight was brought back to direct LUCIFER Season 5’s “BlueBallz” and “A Little Harmless Stalking,” and Season 6’s “Buckets of Baggage.”
While not in any of the episodes directed by his friend Speight, Rob Benedict played LUCIFER Season 6 Big Bad Vincent Le Mec (who is briefly possessed by the soul of Kevin Alejandro’s goodhearted Daniel Espinosa), who murders Dan and tries to kill Lucifer. SUPERNATURAL fans know Benedict as the mercurial character who starts out as mild-mannered author Chuck Shirley, who is revealed to be a Prophet of the Lord – and then actually turns out to be God, who starts out as helpful but is revealed to be that show’s ultimate Big Bad.
LUCIFER – Season 5 Key Art |©2020 Netflix
Benedict and Speight created and starred in their own Web series, KINGS OF CON, available on Amazon Prime, as well as hosting the “Saturday Night Special” concert events at SUPERNATURAL conventions, where Benedict’s band Louden Swain performs. Given this close connection, did Speight propose that Benedict expand his onscreen villainy to the show’s final season?
“That’s not impossible,” says Costa, because Richard is a friend – he’s directed many episodes of the show, and he’s also very friendly with us and with the cast. Not every director [is] – some directors come and they do their job and they go home, and even if they do a very good job, they’re not necessarily in touch with the show a lot. But Richard really was. Richard really became a member of the LUCIFER family. So, he may have suggested that casting. That’s something I don’t know, but that’s not out of the realm of possibility. That could have happened.”
Then again, Costa continues, “I’m pretty sure it was a nice coincidence. If there was any undue influence from [Benedict’s] SUPERNATURAL role, I was unaware of that. Because I don’t watch SUPERNATURAL, so I didn’t know that. I remember it coming up, and people mentioning it, but only after he had been cast. So, if there were conversations beforehand of like, “Oh, that guy! Oh, he was on SUPERNATURAL, we should get him, that would be fun,” I don’t know.”
Then Costa reminds us of something we may have forgotten, which was that Aimee Garcia, LUCIFER’s astute crime scene expert Ella Lopez, guest-starred on SUPERNATURAL in the 2008 Season 3 episode “Jus in Bello” as Nancy Fitzgerald, a devout Christian receptionist at a police station. “There was a lot of speculation when we cast her on LUCIFER that her character [Ella] was going to turn out to be an angel as a wink to her character on SUPERNATURAL. Obviously, that didn’t turn out to be the case, but I think a lot of that exists in the minds of fans. But then also, we do do things like that,” Costa laughs. “That’s not so unusual.”
Case in point: “We had that episode in Season 3, where Lucifer becomes obsessed with BONES, and we intentionally cast someone who we knew had been on BONES in order to be on the show in this very meta, bizarre moment, where Lucifer believes he has caught the murderer, but then he realizes that it’s not, it’s only that that guy was on BONES. So, we cast somebody that sort of played themselves as an actor who appeared on BONES, and he really did appear on BONES [laughs]. So, we do do weird meta stuff like that, but that didn’t have anything to do with Rob Benedict as far as I know.”
LUCIFER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON | © 2016 Warner Home Video
However, Costa adds, “Here’s a fun fact. So, Richard played Gabriel on SUPERNATURAL, obviously. And when we were doing Season 5, thinking it was the last season, and knowing we were going to have this big angel gathering, for a while, we were like, ‘Richard’s got to play an angel. We’ve got to get him to play an angel.’ In this exact context of talking about, ‘He played one on SUPERNATURAL, and he’s part of the show, so he should play one here,’ as a nod to the SUPERNATURAL fans. And we really had intended to do that.”
Richard Speight Jr. as Gabriel in SUPERNATURAL – Season 13 – “Exodus” | © 2018 The CW Network, LLC/Robert Falconer
The snag: “But then the character of Gabriel became a real character on our show [played by Kimia Behpoornia]. It became, ‘Well, we can’t have Richard …’ If Richard was appearing at a barbeque, and you see him in the background, that’s a fun gag, because, “Oh, Gabriel’s there.” But then when Gabriel becomes a character, that can’t be played by Richard. And we made Gabriel a female angel. And so, Richard’s potential cameo got changed and erased because of the dictates of the story. But yeah, it would have been exactly what you’re describing, where we would have done an inside joke like that, but it ended up not working out.”
STAY TUNED FOR PART 5 OF OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
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Article: LUCIFER: Exclusive interview with writer and co-executive producer Mike Costa on SUPERNATURAL connections – Part 4
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