It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Tom Sturridge playing Lord Morpheus.
The English actor perfectly conveyed the King of Dream’s fury and kindness in The Sandman, but the creator of the character has revealed that another famous name had initially hoped to fill the role.
While appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Neil Gaiman shared that Michael Jackson wanted to play Dream of The Endless.
“By 1996, I was being taken to Warners, where the then-president of Warner Bros. sat me down and told me that Michael Jackson had phoned him the day before and asked him if he could star as Morpheus in The Sandman,” said the author who also serves as executive producer on the show. “So, there was a lot of interest in this and they knew that it was one of the Crown Jewels and what did I think? And I was like, ‘Ooh-um.’”
The fact that the King of Pop (who passed away in 2009) asked to portray the King of Dreams is testament to how long it has taken to get The Sandman made. Joseph Gordon Levitt was initially set to produce and star as the comic book character in a film which was announced in 2013 but never got off the ground.
“I was like, ‘It’s going to be so easy to cast! We just find, you know, an English-speaking actor with great cheekbones, there’s loads of them out there,’” Gaiman said of the Netflix series. “We saw, in the end, about 1,500 Morpheus auditions.”
