How The Umbrella Academy Made Luther's Gorilla Body (Without CGI)
Here's how The Umbrella Academy gives Tom Hopper's Luther Hargreeves the body of an ape. Each and every member of the Umbrella Academy carries scars from their childhood, whether that be substance addiction, a fragile ego, or having no physical body and only communicating through a rarely-sober sibling. For Luther, growing up an adopted child of Sir Reginald Hargreeves means being burdened with an ape-like body. Luther was originally born with gifts of super-strength and endurance, but after the other Academy members left home, he embarked on a dangerous solo mission handling a mysterious "biochemical threat." The assignment ended badly, and Reginald saved Luther by injecting him with an experimental serum.
In Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's original comics, Luther's head is grafted onto the body of an actual ape. For the live-action Netflix TV show, however, his human torso is transformed by Reginald's serum. Tom Hopper's character becomes uber-muscular, hairier than your average male, and his upper half is covered by patches of gray primate-like skin. Though Luther typically covers up in XXL clothes, he occasionally strips off to reveal his animalistic features in all their glory. The Umbrella Academy's Luther effect looks deeply impressive, and viewers might be surprised to learn Tom Hopper's ape-ish-ness is achieved entirely through practical effects, with no CGI.
Luther Hargreeves has two "looks" (though that feels a rather grandiose term for an ape-man) throughout The Umbrella Academy's two seasons on Netflix. More commonly, Luther is clothed, completely covering his animal features. But his muscles still need to bulge out, and despite Tom Hopper's athletic condition, regular biceps weren't quite super-enough for The Umbrella Academy. According to showrunner Steve Blackman (via Vulture), initial muscle suit designs made Luther's proportions look ridiculous, shrinking his head and waist on camera. Instead, Christopher Hargadon (Umbrella Academy costume designer) describes a lengthy process of "redefining [the muscles], paring it down, flattening the stomach, making everything a bit smaller" to create a super-muscly bodysuit that didn't distort Luther's proportions too comically. The over-sized clothes then went on top, which Hargadon claims added another 30% visual mass. Speaking to SyfyWire, Tom Hopper confirmed the muscle suit that goes underneath Luther's clothes is a simple two-minute zip-up to slip into.
The Umbrella Academy's second Luther style comes when he goes topless, which requires a far more elaborate creation process. KNB EFX crafted a prosthetic muscle suit after taking molds of Tom Hopper's real body, then hand-stitched each hair into the artificial skin. In Netflix's Umbrella Academy: Behind The Scenes podcast, Hopper described the 3-hour process of having the various pieces of Luther's bare torso glued to his body, painted, and arranged. Not only did Luther's topless suit make sitting down between takes an impossibility, but Hopper had an overheating problem. A coolant system was trialed, but only ended up making the actor inside hotter according to Klaus actor, Robert Sheehan.
Creating Luther's ape look was evidently an arduous step in The Umbrella Academy's production process, but the results speak for themselves. Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's comic story is packed with details that should be impossible to translate for live-action - Luther's ape body among them. But Tom Hopper's awkwardness wearing Luther's muscly suit echoes how Luther is still adjusting to his ape body. His bare torso prosthetics contain scar tissue that hints toward past injuries and self-harm, and Steve Blackman's Umbrella Academy production team also based the positioning of Luther's extra muscles and bones on actual ape physiology (via THR). With such devilish attention to detail, The Umbrella Academy crafts an authentic - but still believable - Luther Hargreeves.