There is little doubt that playing Morpheus was one of the most coveted roles when it was announced that The Sandman will be turned into a film back in the late 1990s. So it's no surprise that big names wanted the part in the Warner Bros. project. For instance, Neil Gaiman has just revealed that the late Michael Jackson had wanted to be cast as the Lord of Dreams when the movie was originally announced three decades ago.
Neil Gaiman recently made an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast where he admitted that top brass at Warner Bros. had informed him of the King of Pop’s interest in the role of Morpheus.
“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,” Gaiman said. “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.'”
It's hard to imagine Michael Jackson as Morpheus since we all know him as ... Michael Jackson. We're pretty sure that the late pop star would have tried his best to play Dream of the Endless but it's also clear that Neil Gaiman had his own vision of what the adaptation of The Sandman should be.
Neil Gaiman also shared how they initially thought Morpheus will be an easy role to cast. “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,'” he stated. “We saw, in the end, about 1500 Morpheus auditions.”
In the end, Tom Sturridge would land the role several decades later and it's certainly the perfect fit.
All episodes of The Sandman are now streaming on Netflix.
Related: The Sandman Showrunner Says Morpheus' Son Could Appear in Season 2
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