Aidan Gallagher On The Most Difficult Scene To Film For Umbrella Academy

In 2019, Netflix played a big part in kickstarting the current television and movie trend of off-kilter, unique takes on the superhero genre when The Umbrella Academy premiered on February 15, 2019. The show is based on the graphic novel series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá about an adopted dysfunctional family of superpowered siblings. After growing apart as adults, they are brought back together by the death of their father figure, Reginald Hargreeves, to face a new and terrible threat.

The Netflix series adaptation takes some creative liberties in the transfer of media, but overall the story of the first season follows the same plot line, while season 2 takes on a story featured in a following graphic novel. Hargreeves is played by Colm Feore, a cold, methodical man who gives the children numbers instead of names. The seven siblings are Tom Hopper as Number One/Luther, David Castañeda as Number Two/Diego, Emmy Raver-Lampman as Number Three/Allison, Robert Sheehan as Number Four/Klaus, Aidan Gallagher as Number Five, Justin H. Min as Number Six/Ben, and Elliot Page as Number Seven/Vanya.

The Umbrella Academy has been extremely successful, and a second season was released on July 31, 2020 with a third currently in production. One of the fan-favorite characters of the series is definitely Number Five, the time-traveling, teleporting, old-man-in-a-young-body played by Gallagher, who was only 15 years old when season 1 of The Umbrella Academy came out. Despite that, the talented young actor manages to accurately play the homicidal and caustic Number Five very well.

Talking about his time filming The Umbrella Academy, Gallagher revealed what scene in the series was the most difficult to film, and the answer might surprise you.

In an interview with Collider, Gallagher spoke about his experience filming various fight sequences and other scenes. Although the conversation took place around the time the first season of The Umbrella Academy was released, Gallagher's choice for the toughest scene to film is for a very unique reason, one that means later scenes would be unlikely to change his answer.

Gallagher found one scene from the pilot episode, "We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals," as the hardest one to film. The scene in question is at the end of the episode, when Number Five tells Vanya about the end of the world. The reason Gallagher picked this scene as the most difficult? It turns out that it was one of the first to be filmed for the series. Gallagher said, "As an actor, the first day of any production is the most stressful. It's the test to figure out and see if the chemistry works between the characters, and you can feel out what direction everybody is going in." It was his first time acting within the relationship of Vanya and Number Five, two characters who share a close sibling relationship despite spending so many years apart. 

For Gallagher, he elaborated on his experience working on The Umbrella Academy with this cast, saying, "I can't think of one thing that I, personally, would have done differently. As an actor, it's a real pleasure of mine, and a very exciting aspect of the show, that I get to learn so much from these great actors." There was likely a huge amount of pressure on Gallagher's shoulders while joining a big Netflix project like this, but the young actor has certainly held his own, truly embodying Number Five and standing out amidst such a talented, extensive cast.