Neil Gaiman explains why Tom Ellis isn’t playing Lucifer in The Sandman

Last week, Netflix pulled back the curtain on its adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, a wonderfully imaginative comic book about mythology, destiny, dreams and change. It’s hard to summarize the plot in a sentence — or a paragraph, or a novella — but the cast looks excellent, and includes Game of Thrones veterans Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister) as hubristic magician Roderick Burgess and Gwendoline Christie (Brienne) as Lucifer, lord of hell.

Christie’s casting raised a few eyebrows, especially fans of the Netflix show Lucifer, starring Tom Ellis as the title character. You see, the version of Lucifer that Tom Ellis plays is actually based on the Lucifer from The Sandman, who got his own spinoff comic series after Gaiman’s original story ended. There were some Lucifer fans who hoped that Ellis would reprise the character in the new show, but it was not to be, and Gaiman was happy to explain why.

“The theology and cosmogony of Lucifer is a long way from Sandman’s,” the author wrote on his Tumblr. “It’s ‘inspired by’ Sandman, but you can’t easily retrofit the Lucifer version to get back to Sandman, if you see what I mean. It seemed easier and more fun to have the Sandman version of Lucifer be, well, much closer to the Sandman version of Lucifer.”

In The Sandman, Lucifer is a suave, powerful being who kind of has an androgynous, David Bowie-esque look. It must be said, Christie fits the bill very well.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does with the character. We probably have a ways to go before the show comes out, but I’m glad to see that things are moving.

Boyd Holbrook (the Corinthian) teases how long The Sandman will run on Netflix

According to star Boyd Holbrook, who plays the frightful nightmare the Corinthian — a ravenous serial killer with mouths of razor teeth where his eyes should be — the first season of the show started shooting around Christmas and is scheduled to run through early summer. “It was a long process,” he said of his audition. “I read the script and they were really adamant about everyone auditioning, so I went in – it must have been like a year ago, probably – and then I didn’t hear anything until probably like September or something like that.”

"Dave Goyer’s on it, Allan Heinberg is our showrunner. These guys know what they’re doing. Our directors, these guys are smart and they’re artists and they’re craftsmen. I think no one’s leaving any stone unturned on what stories to incorporate and how to weave them in together and how to play this storyline through. I think people are just going to see this thing realized, and transforming it is really what it’s all about. It is a hard show to turn into reality. There’s so much set building and so much design that goes into this, so a lot of people are employed to get that done. And with such grandiose sets and all that stuff, you have to have a lot of people coming to an agreement on a decision."

The Sandman will indeed be tricky to pull off, but worth it if Netflix can do it. For now, they’re making the one season, but this is a big story. “I think everyone wants the show to continue [beyond Season 1],” Holbrook continued. “I think it’s a standard contract that’s like seven, five years whatever. We have talked about all that. I don’t know if it’ll all work out. I think it might work out in different blocks of time, but yeah you definitely want to have some sort of macro idea of how long something’s gonna last. But I don’t wanna give away the details of how long.”

Fingers crossed.

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h/t ComicBook.com, Collider