Neil Gaiman saw hundreds of Sandman auditions before finding a perfect lead

Neil Gaiman fears fans will complain about The Sandman actors (“Of course they’re going to have complaints! That’s what they do.”), but they’ll be won over.

It takes a long time to find the perfect actor to portray a character as iconic as Morpheus, the dour personification of dreams in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Auditioning actors for the upcoming Netflix adaptation, Gaiman and the production sat through literally hundreds of tapes. At least now we have our perfect Morpheus, although we still don’t know for certain who it is.

“I can say we had 200-odd auditions for Morpheus before we found someone that we really liked,” Gaiman recently told Yahoo Entertainment.  “And then we watched another 300 or 400 auditions, but it was clear that we’d found the one person capable of saying those lines and making them actually work. So we hired him!”

Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novel has long been deemed unfilmable, with numerous failed attempts made over the years. But Netflix’s version is slowly coming together. The rumor is that English actor Tom Sturridge (Mary Shelley, The Boat That Rocked) is playing the lead role of Dream, but we can’t be sure. Gaiman teases us.

PARK CITY, UT – JANUARY 27: Tom Sturridge attends the “Velvet Buzzsaw” Premiere during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival at Eccles Center Theatre on January 27, 2019 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by George Pimentel/Getty Images)

In any case, The Sandman is now multiple weeks into filming, and Gaiman shared his reaction to seeing Dream in his glass prison, where we meet him near the beginning of the story. “I’ve been watching dailies, but nothing produced the profound, emotional reaction on me that watching a camera test of our Morpheus in his glass prison did. I saw him and said, ‘Oh, this is Sandman.”

That’s an iconic scene from issue #1 of the comic, “Sleep of the Just,” so I don’t blame him for getting emotional.

In other casting news, we’ve heard that the Corinthian — the charming-but-violent nightmare with teeth for eyes — may be played either Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games) or Dacre Montgomery (Stranger Things). I very much like the idea of Montgomery!

And then there’s Dream’s sister Death, one of the comic’s most popular characters. Gaiman thinks they cast the  “perfect” Death for the TV show, finding an actor able to capture her “love and sensibleness.” Personally, I think Kat Dennings, who voiced the character in the Audible audiobook, would still be a great option to carry over to the Netflix show.

Whoever it is, Gaiman is confident she can pull off the character. “I don’t think anybody is going to have any complaints,” he said. Then, entertainingly, he took that right back. “Why would I say that? It’s fandom, of course they’re going to have complaints! That’s what they do.”

Still, he thinks that when “they watch Death’s first appearance in ‘The Sound of Her Wings,’ it’ll all be OK.” The sooner the better.

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