Every great detective needs a loyal sidekick. For Sherlock Holmes, it’s Watson. For Batman, it’s Robin. For John Luther…it’s his coat.
“Luther’s coat is his superhero cape,” says Susan Lyall, the costume designer on the character’s first feature-film case, Luther: The Fallen Sun. “Once it’s on, he’s on.”
Ever since Idris Elba made his debut as the beloved character in 2010 in the original series, the gifted yet troubled British copper has been sporting the same iconic look: slacks, a dress shirt, a red tie and a gray wool jacket that appears to be indestructible.
“The coat was a bit of a love letter to Columbo,” says Elba, referring to Peter Falk’s famous (and famously rumpled) TV sleuth. “When I was growing up, my family all watched Columbo, this sort of weird, charismatic, super smart detective. His voice was funny, and I just loved him. I was thinking, if I got to play a detective, I want to be like him.”
Elba continues, “So I remember when we talked about ‘what does [Luther] wear?’, the coat was one of the first things we designed, and we designed with a color scheme in mind. Columbo wore a mack, and I wanted to wear something that felt like tweed, that felt like the weather was gray. So it was the gray, and then the red tie was the fire. Ultimately, it’s just a coat, but for me, it was like designing a superhero outfit.”
Unlike Superman or Batman, however, Luther is rarely seen out of his crime-fighting costume. Early on, Elba says he made the decision that Luther would almost never take off the coat — or even button it up. The only concession is that sometimes he pulls up the collar.
After originally collaborating with Luther’s longtime costume designer James Keast, Elba reunited with Lyall, with whom he previously worked on the 2017 film Molly’s Game, to update the look for Luther’s first foray into film, Fallen Sun. Of course, it’s a fool’s errand to reinvent a signature style (just ask the creator of the nippled Batsuit), especially since a scene in the fifth season of the Luther series, set at the detective’s home, showed that he had a wardrobe full of identical shirts, ties, and blazers all lined up, almost like off-the-rack uniforms.
“We had 20 coats made, all with slightly different requirements depending on the action and stunt,” says Lyall. “The coats are slashed, stabbed, bloodied, rained upon, dropped into freezing water, smashed against subway walls and, generally, suffer a great deal of wear and tear. Typical of any film, we shoot out of sequence, hence we had to maintain coats in varying degrees of distress, ready to be used as the schedule proceeded.”
Sadly, considering the coat has been through so much over the course of Luther’s long career, the original is long gone. And the material that it was made from is no longer available. But given the outfit is so synonymous with its macho mannequin, the film couldn’t have proceeded without such a crucial element. So the process of re-creating the coat involved having the fabric woven on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis under the guidance of the Harris Tweed Authority.
Only the best for a “character” so high-profile that Elba’s co-star Dermot Crowley jokes it has its own trailer!
