Netflix’s The Sandman is flying high right now. Season 1 was a huge success, becoming the biggest TV show on the planet for a while in August. And now, we have official confirmation that it will return for more episodes, which will cover many of the comic’s most iconic issues. It couldn’t have gone better…well, apart from the myriad haters online, whom Gaiman is exceptionally good at putting in their places.
So what are these trolls saying, exactly? They don’t tend to be people who have read the comics, nor do they understand the basics of the story. For instance, some folks moan that Death is portrayed by a Black actress, or that Lucifer is a woman, or that there are a lot of gay characters. None of these things should be problems, but this is the Internet; people love to hate.
Thankfully, Neil Gaiman takes down trolls like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole, especially on Twitter. With his experience fighting against haters, he’s noticed a recurring theme: “If you look at their profiles, they don’t like vaccines, they don’t like Democrats, and they’re not big on voting,” he told Inverse.
"Occasionally, we’d get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren’t in the comics, and then we’d go ‘Have you read the comics?’ And they’d go ‘No.’ And we’d go, ‘They were gay in the comics.’ And they’d go ‘You’re just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show! And then we went Number 1 in the world for four weeks."
If there’s one way to prove the haters wrong, that’s it!
Neil Gaiman talks about casting Lucifer in The Sandman
Before Tom Ellis brought Lucifer to life on Lucifer, the character was first introduced in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics. When it was announced that Gwendoline Christie would be playing the Lord of Hell on The Sandman TV show, there was some confusion. According to Gaiman, the moaners “tended to be Tom Ellis fans” who expected to see him reprise his role.
As he puts it, the Tom Ellis fans were like, “‘I love Tom Ellis! Lucifer is based on him, why didn’t you cast him?’ And honestly, he’s not. He’s a lovable rogue. He wouldn’t work in Sandman because we have to get someone that makes people scared,” he said.
Christie’s Lucifer definitely does that. Look no further than the epic transfiguration battle against Morpheus:
Fun fact: in the comics, the design of Lucifer is based on David Bowie. “I wouldn’t have cast David Bowie as he was before he died, because the whole idea was that Lucifer is meant to look like a beautiful angel,” Gaiman said. “I absolutely would have cast David Bowie if we had a time machine and a cloning device and we could have had David at any time between his 20th birthday and let’s say his 50th birthday, and I would have done the casting then.”
"I suspect that David might well have been keen seeing Gwendoline play the part because he was somebody who was asked who he’d like to portray him in a biopic and his answer was Tilda Swinton. So he probably would have loved to have seen Gwendoline."
Death and Joanna Constantine
The trolls didn’t stop there. Now we move on to the other casting choices that certain people didn’t like. Firstly, there’s Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death. In the comics, Death is usually portrayed as white, whereas in the show she is Black. For some reason, people took issue with this, despite the character literally being the anthropomorphic personification of death, and therefore not really having a race. “Death’s casting (Kirby Howell-Baptise) wasn’t controversial with Sandman fans, because Sandman fans know that The Endless are supposed to look like what the people looking at them think they look like,” Gaiman said.
And then there’s Jenna Coleman’s Johanna Constantine, who takes over John Constantine’s role in the comics. To be fair, Johanna Constantine is still a character in the comics, but she is an ancestor of John. Essentially, the TV show simplified things and got Jenna Coleman to play both roles rather than casting two different people.
“Again, people were like, why did you gender-swap John Constantine and why did you replace him with this imaginary character that we’ve never seen in the comics before?” Gaiman said. “But Sandman fans know that she was a character introduced in Sandman No. 13 in 1989 and that she goes off and has several more adventures in the Sandman storyline.”
In other words, never doubt Neil Gaiman. He knows more about Sandman than literally everyone.
Neil Gaiman reveals his favorite Sandman scene
Like everyone, Gaiman’s favorite moment in The Sandman always changes, but currently, it’s Gilbert’s final scene in Episode 10, “Lost Hearts.” In the scene, Gilbert (Stephen Fry) confesses to Rose Walker that he is not a man, but a place inside The Dreaming called Fiddler’s Green. He gracefully returns to his position, becoming a beautiful green landscape.
"It’s moved through Episode 5 to Episode 6 to Episode 4 a couple of times. I think the last time I answered this question I said it was Stephen Fry’s final scene in Episode 10. There’s something incredibly moving and heartbreaking and just gentle, and you also realize what an astonishing actor Stephen Fry is. And you get our VFX team to do magic, and you get Tom Sturridge. The whole end of Episode 10 might be my favorite, at least right now."
While I love that scene, I’m obsessed with Dream and Hob Gadling’s relationship. Oh, and the battle between Dream and Lucifer; and Dream tagging along with Death as she makes her rounds; and the summoning of the Fates. I love it all, basically.
All 11 episodes of The Sandman season one are now streaming on Netflix. We probably won’t see any new ones for a while yet.
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