The Thursday Murder Club gets a Lucifer twist

The Thursday Murder Club is coming to Netflix and the impressive star cast is constantly growing.

Tom Ellis (Luficfer) has been cast in the role in the crime comedy based on the novel of the same name by Richard Osman. Deadline reported that in addition to Ellis, Richard E. Grant, Geoff Bell, Paul Freeman, Sarah Niles and Ingrid Oliver will also star in the film.

Also starring are Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Jonathan Pryce, Naomi Ackie, Daniel Mays and Henry Lloyd-Hughes, all of whom were previously announced.

About The Thursday Murder Club

The film is about a group of friends who solve murders in a retirement home just for fun. However, things change when they become involved in a real case.

The new film is written and directed by Chris Columbus, the filmmaker behind Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Jennifer Todd and Columbus are producers. Holly Bario, Jeb Brody, Eleanor Columbus and Jo Burns are executive producers.

Osman is well known in the UK. He hosts the BBC game show Richard Osman’s House of Games and has been quizmaster of the daytime quiz Pointless. He became a literary celebrity with the publication of The Thursday Murder Club in 2020, as the book became a bestseller and sold millions of copies.

Richard Osman talks about writing

In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, the author gave insights into his writing. He was asked about the development of his characters and whether they are based on people he knows in real life.

“I didn’t really base them on people,” Osman said. “They’re actually the four corners of my own brain, I guess, in that I can get to any of them very easily. I mean, the main narrator, Joyce, is a 78-year-old woman, and I find it disturbingly easy to get inside her head! Whenever I get stuck, I write a Joyce chapter.”

“But I don’t like characters that are pure archetypes,” he added. “I love when someone comes in and you think, ‘Oh, that’s going to be the villain,’ and he may be the villain, but he’s also something else. I like to think, ‘If an actor had that supporting role, would he be happy even if he was only in two scenes?'”

Why does he do what he does? He’s just interested in entertainment.

“There are writers I love and admire who do a different job and create extraordinary art that adds to the great canon of literature,” Osman said. “But hopefully, if anything, I’m an entertainer. I write the books that I would read myself, and I write them as well as I can, but my main job is to try to entertain people, not to push the history of literature in a particular direction. I’m here to give people a book that they can’t put down, and if they’re on a plane, then the plane ride goes by faster, and if they’re on vacation, they remember the vacation because they read the book. That gets a little scorned sometimes, but it’s really hard to do!”

He concluded: “I’d like to be a Cormac McCarthy or an Alice Munro, but I’m not. But I have one place and that is: ‘Would you like to be royally entertained?’ A little laughter, a little tears, a mystery – I try to do that as well as I can.”

There is currently no release date for The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix, but production has begun.