If you’re looking for a dark, complicated thriller to watch, Hard Sun, created and written by Neil Cross (Luther), is currently available to stream at Hulu. Detectives Robert Hicks (Jim Sturgess) and Elaine Renko (Agyness Deyn) find themselves partners, even though they stand on different ends of the moral spectrum and distrust each other’s motives, for good reason. But in order to survive until the end of the world, they must find some way to learn to work together.

During this interview with Collider, show creator Neil Cross talked about how the story for Hard Sun evolved, his desire to make an anti-Moonlighting, the five-year plan, the evolving dynamic between Renko and Hicks, why he finds himself drawn to telling dark stories, and what does and doesn’t scare him. He also talked about making the upcoming season of Luther the “biggest, most exciting, most thrilling, scariest” yet, what he has enjoyed about writing the Luther-Alice dynamic, over the seasons, and how that coat came to be.

Collider: How did Hard Sun come about? Was Luther not dark enough, that you had to think about possible end of the world story ideas?

NEIL CROSS: Yeah, this is just a bit of light comedy. It came in two waves, like two LEGO bricks. I had the idea for the characters first. I wanted to do an anti-buddy show, like an anti-Moonlighting, where we had a man and a woman who really, really dislike, distrust and fear one another, who are forced, through circumstances, to work together, and never fall in love, never go to bed with each other, and never become friends, but are somehow bound by something. I didn’t know what it was, who they were, or what kind of genre or world this would be set in. I just had this notion of this relationship. I am a massive Moonlighting fan. I love Moonlighting, but it was that will they or won’t they, and then they did and it killed it. So, Renko and Hicks never will. They will never even like each other. And then, I’m a compulsive book buyer and, twice a year, I go through my shelves and select books I know I’m never gonna read or know I don’t really like, and I box them and give them to charity. I was doing that task to music and I was playing David Bowie, and the first track on his album Ziggy Stardust is called “Five Years.” It’s a song in which the character played by Bowie learns that the world has got five years left, and instead of it descending into a mad, nihilistic, Megadeth dirge, he goes for a walk across this market square and everything and everyone he sees is given this absolute value, in the light of the knowledge of their oncoming destruction. It’s actually this really uplifting song about the value of human life, and I realized that I could put those characters in that world. That’s where the idea of the show comes from.

Do you always think about the five-year plan you’ve set up for this story, or do you try not to think about that endpoint?

CROSS: I’ve always got idea and I have this endless collection of notes, randomly across my computer and my house. There are notes written on the fridge. Hard Sun is a quite unique mixture of genre. There’s a cop show in there, there’s a conspiracy thriller show in there, there science fiction in there, and there are big, personal story arcs. The idea is that, as we progress, we can tell different kinds of stories, in different ways. We’re not limited by genre because we’ve started out unlimited by genre. We can tell any story we want, in any way that we want, so it’s really quite liberating.

How we’re introduced to Renko, in the beginning of the series, is so interesting. Did you think a lot about how you wanted to introduce viewers to this world?

CROSS: Yeah. You want something to be really entertaining. It’s like when you were in creative writing classes and they say, “You’ve gotta write a really good first sentence which hooks the reader.” That stuff is my really good first sentence. It’s almost challenging the audience and saying, “Try to turn it off, after that!” It’s pure story. There’s almost no words, in the first six or seven minutes of this show. It’s just stories with pictures, but also character stories with pictures. It’s quite a challenge to do that, but I think it works really well.

Because Renko and Hicks do have to rely on each other, to a certain degree, will they ever get to a point where they don’t necessarily like each other, but at least understand each other?

CROSS: I want the audience to want them to. When I pitched the show, I said, “In every episode, one will begin to trust the other, a little bit, and then the other will pull the carpet out from under them.” They’re never gonna be best friends. They might have moments of connection and moments when they’re working together towards one goal, but they’ll never be besties.

How challenging was it to cast actors that work well together, but don’t have chemistry that’s so good that people want them to get together?

CROSS: Casting is always a slightly fearsome process because there’s always a randomized element. You’re not only looking for the right actors, but there are issues of actor availability and who is out there, available to cast. We went through the casting process for this show with a great deal of trepidation because we knew we had to get outrageously lucky, not once but twice, and we did. We just got lucky. They’ve got a very particular relationship and energy on screen that you couldn’t plan. You could just cross your fingers and hope, and it absolutely worked. I’ve never quite seen anything like their chemistry. They’re got a very unique chemistry, and it’s a completely non-sexualized chemistry. It’s all about these two people, in this world.

These two characters seem like complete messes. Do they get anything right, in their lives?

CROSS: They do pull off something quite audacious by working together, but that’s only going to cause further problems.

Will we learn more about exactly what’s going on with the relationship between Renko and her son?

CROSS: Yes. Part of me would just love to do a two-hander for an hour, between her and Daniel (Jojo Macari), with no car chases, no explosions and no fights. He’s remarkable. He’s beautiful, he’s terrifying and he’s angelic. The reason that the first Star Wars was such a success was because we liked the people in it. You just wanna see them together. I like writing complicated human relationships because it’s just fun.

Personally, I think there’s been no better, more complicated and fascinating dynamic on television than Luther and Alice, in Luther.

CROSS: Thank you! Writing those two was great fun. When I first wrote Alice, she was only going to be in one episode, but I loved her. The weird aspect of writing Alice is that she’s much more clever than me and much wittier than me. The bizarre thing is that she’s better read than I am. Alice can quote from books I’ve never read. I don’t know how that happens, but it’s good fun.

With the new season, was it hard to then figure out how to make Alice’s presence still be felt, even when she’s not around?

CROSS: That’s a very good, cunning question. One of the things I like most about Luther is that it never forgets its past. Everybody who was in it, at least the major characters, continue to have a slightly ghostly presence in the show. You can see them weighing down Idris Elba’s shoulders. It’s a show which is very aware of its legacy and its cast.

I love how Luther’s coat has become as well-known as the character, itself.

CROSS: That was by design. That was one of the few things I planned which has gone exactly according to plan. I’m a huge, ridiculous fan of Columbo, so I slightly stole the coat from Columbo. I stole a lot from Columbo. I stole the format from Columbo – the idea that we see the crime committed first and there’s no mystery to it. When Idris went in for the first fitting, I got the polaroids and I just went, “That’s it! That’s gonna become an iconic image.” I think we had a little bet on it.

At the end of the last season, we saw Luther walking this line between being in line with the police and going rogue. What can you tease about the upcoming season?

CROSS: We always think it’s over, and then as soon as it’s over, we both start to miss it. We both agreed, this time, as soon as we started talking about coming back again, that there’s no point in coming back, if we can’t do the biggest, most exciting, most thrilling, scariest Luther that there’s been, so that’s what we’re doing.

Since you’ve been to some pretty deep depths of human depravity, just how much darker can you go?

CROSS: Unfortunately, there’s a bottomless well of it. I never write about what I would like to do to other people. I write about what I’m scared other people might do to me, and I exist in a perpetual state of terror. I really do. I’ve got a life-long, crippling fear of the dark. I’ve got a terror of the dark. If I’m in a house by myself, I’ve got all the lights on in the house. If there’s a light in a cupboard, I have to turn it on because I can’t bear the idea of any darkness in the house, whatsoever. The reason the crimes in Hard Sun and Luther are so scary is because they could be your life. It’s really just born of me, walking through the world, terrified of horrible things happening to me or to people that I love. That’s a blessing and a curse.

Is there anything that frightens everyone else, that doesn’t frighten you?

CROSS: Clowns. Clowns are not scary. I remember, a long time ago, when I was a teenager with hair and a 28-inch waist and someone told me about their fear of clowns, I thought, “Walking across this field at midnight, if I turned around and there was a clown following me, then I’d be scared.” But, I’d actually be scared of anybody who’s following me across a field in the dark. So, I don’t find clowns frightening. It’s a horror meme. It’s something you’re supposed to find frightening, so people pretend to. I’m scared of mannequins and mice and dogs. I really, really, really like horror movies. I will watch any horror movie, but not many of them actually frighten me. Lake Mungo is a tiny, very low-budget Australian horror movie. It’s a fake talking heads documentary. I had to take a sleeping pill because I was so fucking terrified, and there’s no jump cuts and no soundtrack, but it scared the shit out of me, more than any film has scared me, since I was a child. It was a complete surprise. I started watching it during the daytime, and I had to turn it off and wait for my wife to come home to watch the rest of it.

Hard Sun is available to stream on Hulu.