Neil Gaiman’s seminal comic The Sandman has been around for over 30 years, and it’s finally getting the live-action treatment it deserves from Netflix. During the streamer’s Geeked Week event, they revealed that the show will premiere on August 5, showed us a glorious new teaser, and announced that Star Wars legend Mark Hamill had joined the cast as fan-favorite character Merv Pumpkinhead.
Mervyn Pumpkinhead is a recurring character in the graphic novels. He’s the resident janitor of the Dreaming, the imaginary realm we all visit whenever we go to sleep. Yes, he is literally a pumpkin who smokes a cigar. But this is the Dreaming, anything is possible.
During the Sandman panel, showrunner Allan Heinberg talked about what it was like to be able to work with Hamill; one of the most famous faces (and voices) in Hollywood. “He’s fantastic in it and he was such a pleasure to work with. Neil and I had a day with him on Zoom, and he could not have been sweeter,” Heinberg said. “It just made me a new kind of fan of his. I loved him.”
Gaiman also weighed in on how Merv will impact the plot. “Merv is hilarious, that’s the other thing I think that needs saying. Merv was always in the comics, on the one hand, a comic relief, but on the other hand the voice of sanity.”
The resemblance between Hamill and Merv is… well, not uncanny. But we can be sure that Hamill will perfectly channel his inner pumpkin for the part:
yes, you heard right: Mark Hamill will be voicing Merv Pumpkinhead in THE SANDMAN #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/gYF3HBNTJI
— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) June 6, 2022
Of course, Hamill is best known for his portrayal of Luke Skywalker throughout the Star Wars franchise. But he’s also got a very good slate of voice acting roles under his belt. He famously voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series and various other Batman projects. He voiced Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar: The Last Airbender. More recently, he was the voice of Art Rosenbaum in Amazon Prime’s Invincible.
Watch the teaser for The Sandman!
The Sandman is a hard series to explain. It follows Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge), the anthropomorphic personification of dreams, as he goes about his important duties. At the beginning of the series, he gets captured and imprisoned by Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) and his group of occultists. And when he escapes, he finds that his kingdom has fallen:
The Sandman premieres on August 5 on Netflix. The release is finally in sight!
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