Tom Ellis is waiting. The coronavirus shut down production of his TV series Lucifer. He is recovering from surgery following some sort of food reaction – he won’t be drawn on details, saying only: “I have a beef with beef.” Most importantly of all, though, his children are thousands of miles away, in the UK. He shares custody with his ex-wife, the EastEnders star Tamzin Outhwaite, and was scheduled to visit them after filming wrapped on Lucifer’s fifth season, Then the outbreak hit, which meant that he has had to go seven months without seeing them.

“It’s been excruciating,” he confides over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “There is a part of you that isn’t there when they’re not around.” However, as we speak, he is preparing to fly back for a long-awaited reunion; part of a complex transportation schedule that involves several flights back and forth across the Atlantic, punctuated by quarantine on either side. His thoughts keep returning to the UK.

Ellis’s brush with the American healthcare system has made him nostalgic for the NHS. “People here just avoid going to the doctor, because they can’t bear the consequences that might happen financially,” he says. The halt in Lucifer’s production, along with its imminent conclusion (the sixth series will be its last), has him longing to return to the London stage. “It’s like rehab for acting,” he says. Ellis name checks UK delights such as ’Allo ’Allo, the snooker and Challenge Anneka. As if to underline the yearning for his homeland, he is wearing a Three Lions baseball cap. And yet, while Ellis is recognised across the world, in the UK, he is best remembered for a near-decade-old sitcom.

We are here to talk about Lucifer, the show that has kept him in the US, and is about to return to Netflix for its fifth season. This is a big deal. A TV Time study last year found that the series is more successful than anything else streaming in the world, beating even the monolith that is Stranger Things. But Lucifer’s popularity is not totally global. When I told people in the UK that I was going to interview Tom Ellis from Lucifer, I was met primarily with blank stares. Then I would say, “You know, Miranda’s boyfriend,” and the pieces would fall into place. Ellis, you suspect, is used to this reaction.

“I get as many Garys [his character in Miranda] as I get Lucifers in the street over there, without a doubt,” Ellis admits. “Miranda is so ingrained in British popular comedy culture that I think that will always be there. And that’s lovely. When I grew up, I used to watch sitcoms with my grandad. And the ‘You have been watching’ moments, where they would say the actor’s name underneath and they’d wave to camera and all that, that’s my experience of growing up. But I have to look at it and go: ‘That’s really nice. There’s two characters I have played that people remember me for.’”

Fourteen hours later, however, the cancellation was made public and all hell broke loose. Lucifer devotees, or Lucifans if we must, launched a furious grassroots effort to save the programme. The following day, Peter Roth, the head of TV at Warner Bros (who produced the show), called Ellis to say: “We are aware of this reaction and we are looking to find a new home for it.” Ellis threw his weight behind the cause, even appearing on Newsnight to spread the word.

According to him, “I was putting myself out there against my better judgement, so it was a strange time.” “Against the advice of some of my team, even. Everyone kept saying: ‘It’s very, very unlikely that this will happen.’ And I’m still going: ‘So you’re saying there’s a chance?’”

The cavalry appeared in the form of Netflix, reacting to the outcry with an offer to wrap up the show with a two-season deal. So, after saying goodbye to Lucifer, Ellis returned for a fourth season, during which the show’s popularity exploded around the world. The scale of that success seems to be something he is still processing.

“The show is really, really popular in Catholic countries,” he says, shaking his head with astonishment. He had a meeting with Instagram late last year, at which he was informed that 35% of his followers come from Brazil alone. “I think it’s just a general fascination with the devil himself, as opposed to just the show,” he rationalises.

Netflix feels like the natural home for Lucifer. The episodes are longer and looser and shaggier there, less crushed by the regimented demands of an ad-driven US network. In its Fox days, I was not a huge fan, but now that it is on Netflix, things are different. It is stranger and funnier now (and dirtier, too; Ellis’s bare bottom is onscreen so much that it deserves separate billing) and much more willing to take big swings. The forthcoming season contains a musical episode, a black-and-white episode and an episode in which the obnoxious showrunner of a fictional version of Lucifer gets murdered. Oh, and Ellis gets to play Lucifer and Lucifer’s twin brother. The new series is so much fun, in fact, that just as Ellis was preparing to say goodbye to the character all over again, Netflix swooped in once more.

“I’d planned to spend this season in my own grieving process,” he says. “And then, right towards the end, literally as we’d already devised how we would end our show, we had a call from Netflix saying: ‘Would you like to go another season?’”

The Lucifer showrunners agreed and, when the Covid regulations lift, Lucifer will finish shooting season five before rolling straight into season six. That, Ellis maintains, will really be it. “I know we’re the Lazarus of TV shows, but this is definitely going to be the final season,” he insists.