Gwendoline Christie joins Netflix’s version of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Game of Thrones veteran Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) joins the cast of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman on Netflix, which sounds just perfect.

Netflix is currently hard at work on adapting Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman for the small screen. Gaiman’s seminal comic series has been around for over 30 years, and while there have been attempts to adapt it before, nothing’s ever worked, perhaps because it’s a sprawling, imaginative, challenging work that dances on the edge between reality and fantasy, dreaming and waking, sanity and madness. But with HBO having proven that you can adapt ambitious stories like that with Game of Thrones, now is finally time for it to happen, and Netflix sounds like it’s doing it right.

And by that, I mean it’s cast Game of Thrones veteran Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) in an unknown role, according to an exclusive report from Discussing Film. This just feels…right to me on a deep metaphysical level. We don’t know who Christie is playing, but she feels like she belongs in a Neil Gaiman production. And indeed, she lent her voice to a recent radio adaptation of Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle, playing a queen who must stop a sleeping spell from being cast over her kingdom the night before her wedding. For all I know, that’s where Gaiman got the idea to cast her in The Sandman.

And indeed, The Sleeper and the Spindle sounds like it could have been a lost story from The Sandman, which is full of dreamy deviations and detours that add up to a greater whole. Nominally, the story is about Dream of the Endless, one of seven infinite beings who each represent a different facet of the human experience (Dream’s siblings include Destiny, Despair and Death — you get the idea). Dream reckons with his place in the universe, and also he inspires Shakespeare to write A Midsommar Night’s Dream, goes on a roadtrip with his sister Delirium, and there’s one bit where cats are huge and hunt down puny humans for fun…it’s a hard series to pitch in a paragraph, but with her flexible, commanding screen presence, Christie seems like a perfect fit for it.

As for who she could play, there are a lot of options. She might be good as Desire, the most conniving of Dream’s siblings, who has an androgynous energy that Christie already showed off as Brienne in Game of Thrones. But we’ll have to wait to confirm anything.

Although the show is ramping up production, this may be the first firm report we’ve had about the cast. We’ve also heard that English actor Tom Sturridge is playing Dream, and he probably is, but it’s still just talk. But if you’re going to start a new cast for anything, Gwendoline Christie makes a fine first choice.

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