Fox‘s “Lucifer” has cast “The Sopranos” star Michael Imperioli as the angel Uriel for Season 2, executive producer Ildy Modrovich announced during the show’s panel at the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Monday. Modrovich revealed that the brother of Lucifer (Tom Ellis) and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside) will be “coming down in the middle of the season,” which will also see the arrival of the angels’ mother, “Charlotte,” played by Tricia Helfer.
“Mom is the driving force of the season; God was the focus of Season 1, the theme was distant fathers,” fellow exec producr Joe Henderson said. “Lucifer is someone who has yearned for his father’s love, here’s his mother in the flesh, who he clearly has a bad relationship with… she’s the stick of dynamite that we’ve placed in Season 2, and we’re waiting for it to explode.”
“Mum hasn’t always looked like this, so you can imagine how uncomfortable that makes her two sons,” Ellis joked of Helfer’s role. “It’s given myself and D.B. a chance to have a new relationship within the show. You act a little bit differently around your mum than you do when she’s not around.”
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“Lucifer” shared its panel with the cast and executive producers of “Gotham,” who previewed that Season 3 will deepen the influence of the villains who will become an integral part of Batman’s mythology as Bruce Wayne grows up. “You’re really going to see how the villains have taken up residence and become part of the fabric of the city,” said executive producer John Stephens. “We wanted to create that sense from the Batman canon that the villains live all throughout the city.”
With the box office success of “Suicide Squad,” a reporter asked whether we were likely to see early versions of any of those Batman villains on the show this season, which Stephens admitted would be difficult because the characters were being used on the big screen. He did preview that the show will likely introduce a “proto-version” of Killer Croc and “a forerunner of Harley Quinn” at some point, although probably not in Season 3. Batman villains Mad Hatter and Solomon Grundy will be introduced in the third season, and Stephens said that the mythology of Grundy will be tied to both Hugo Strange’s experiments at Indian Hill and the deepening involvement of the Court of Owls, which will move to the forefront of the narrative this year.
Moving from Season 3 into Season 4, we’ll also begin to see stirrings of “the cult of the Joker” in Gotham following the anarchy of Jerome, Stephens previewed. “It’s about developing the myth of The Joker, just like we’re developing the myth of Batman… There are underground movements where they talk about Jerome.”
