The Sandman fans have given the best look yet at some of the series' biggest cast members, including Death, Lucifer and the hotly anticipated Johanna Constantine.
Courtesy of Empire, a slew of new photos have been released featuring various characters from the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's cult-classic comic book series. Tom Sturridge's Dream and Boyd Holbrook's Corinthian are just a couple of those to be given the high-res preview treatment across the simultaneously fantastical and ominous images.
The Sandman, based on Vertigo's 1989 comics of the same name, follows the adventures of Dream, one of seven Endless. These living embodiments of universal concepts such as Destiny and Desire all wield an unfathomable amount of power, yet the ways they put those abilities to use are rarely what could be described as super heroic. The series is set to explore the ways Dream, aka Morpheus, affects the people and places around him as he attempts to make up for his misdeeds throughout his eons long existence. Season 1 has been described as an adaptation of the first Sandman volume, Preludes & Nocturnes, as well as "a little bit more," as Gaiman put it.
Netflix's The Sandman
The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman previously revealed his initial concerns with adapting what is arguably his most beloved work. "It may sound silly, but when I was 14 or 15, my favourite comic was Howard the Duck," Gaiman explained. "I was so excited when I heard George Lucas was making a movie. And then [the film] came out. Howard the Duck became a bad joke. I never wanted that to happen to Sandman, and I saw scripts that would have made that happen... Once a bad version is made, you never quite come back from that."
Gaiman has also opened up about The Sandman's color-blind casting process and backlash to Kirby Howell-Baptiste's casting as Death, saying, "The thing that got me grumpiest was when people on Twitter would go, ‘This is not the gamine-esque, white, gothy Death that I’ve had in my head for all these years, why are you betraying us?" He continued, "It's the Endless – we did color-blind casting, because why wouldn’t you? The comics establish that the characters look like whatever we want them to look like. Anyway, Kirby’s amazing. And I think that people who have been grumbling that she doesn’t look like Death are going to not be grumbling [any more] once they see her be Death."
Alongside Sturridge's Dream and Howell-Baptiste's Death, The Sandman is set to star Mason Alexander Park and Donna Preston as Desire and Despair respectively. The series has also signed on Hollywood icon Mark Hamill as the voice of fan-favorite character Merv Pumpkinhead.
The Sandman premieres on Netflix on Aug. 5.
Source: Empire