The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman explained why he chooses to fire back at online trolls over Netflix's color and gender-blind casting of the comic book adaptation.
In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment at San Diego Comic-Con, Gaiman revealed his reasons for directly replying to people who have taken to Twitter to complain about the show's "wokeness." These so-called fans have lambasted the casting of actors such as Black actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park as Desire and Gwendoline Christie, a woman, cast as the genderless fallen angel Lucifer.
Taking a Sledgehammer to the Ants
"I know the rule is you’re meant to ignore the trolls and not feed the trolls,” Gaiman admitted. "But I would look at people sounding off on Sandman who were obviously not Sandman fans. What I would watch would be 60,000 Sandman fans going, 'Of course you’re doing it this way. Of course you have a non-binary Desire, Desire was always non-binary, that’s brilliant casting.' Or 'Gwendoline as Lucifer, what amazing casting.' And then you’d get five or six people trying to make a lot of fuss who never read Sandman in the first place. And I mostly decided I was done with it."
Gaiman went on to say that while he sometimes feels he should ease up on his retorts, he thinks his general response is warranted given how hard the cast and crew has worked on the show. "Occasionally I do feel like I’m taking an enormous sledgehammer to squash the tiniest ants, and you really shouldn’t," he said. "But then again, they can be really irritating sometimes, and I’m proud of what we made."
The cast of The Sandman shared that they love how Gaiman constantly stands up for them, citing that creators do not often go the extra mile to defend changes to their original work. “He’s one of the greatest living authors of all time, and just the fact that we are adapting this in a time where he’s not only completely ingrained in it and completely getting his DNA on every single frame of it, but that he can clap back at people when they say certain things that aren’t necessarily in line with the original context. … It’s really nice, because you don’t often get that," Park said.
All ten episodes of The Sandman Season 1 are set to debut on Netflix on Aug. 5. Joining Howell-Baptiste, Park and Christie are Tom Sturridge, Vivienne Acheampong, Boyd Holbrook, Charles Dance, Asim Chaudhry and Sanjeev Bhaskar.
Source: Yahoo