Neil Gaiman reveals Michael Jackson asked to play Morpheus in early Sandman film adaptation

It's no secret that an on-screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman's legendary comic book series The Sandman has been a pipe dream for quite some time. Discussions surrounding a potential adaptation of the sleeper hit fantasy series have swirled since the early '90s. At one point, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was cast as the titular Lord of Dreams back in 2016 before that, too, fizzled out.

While the role eventually went to Tom Sturridge, Gaiman revealed on a recent episode of Happy Sad Confused that Gordon-Levitt wasn't the only actor vying for the role of Morpheus throughout the show's decades-long journey to Netflix: Michael Jackson once threw his name into the ring.

"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 shared. "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.'"

Phil Dent/Redferns; Liam Daniel/Netflix Michael Jackson and Tom Sturridge as Dream in 'The Sandman.'

While Jackson and Gordon-Levitt's dreams ultimately never came to fruition, Gaiman shared that he quickly came to realize that finding Morpheus wasn't as simple as he initially thought when it came time to cast for the Netflix series.

"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 joked. "We saw, in the end, about 1500 Morpheus auditions."

Gaiman explained that Sturridge's audition was the first of four that he received in an email from Sandman casting director Lucinda Syson. He shortlisted the Sweetbitter actor straight away.

"I figured that, at the end of a couple of weeks, we'd have a shortlist of five or ten just as good as him, just as right as him, just as — you could say the lines as well as him — and we didn't. At the end of a week, we had Tom. At the end of two weeks, we had Tom. At the end of a month, we had Tom," he said. "At the end of six weeks, we said to Warner Bros: 'It's Tom, isn't it?'"

However, when the production was shuttered for six months due to the coronavirus pandemic, Gaiman said that Netflix encouraged the team to "make sure you've seen everybody," just in case.

"We saw a lot of Morpheuses and what I learned from that is that his lines are really hard to say," Gaiman said. "We saw some fabulous actors. It's not like anybody was bad — there was a level, a bar, that they had to cross in order for us to be watching their video anyway — this was every great actor with great cheekbones on the planet, of all races, of all nationalities, of everything, and at the end it was still Tom."

So what sold him on Sturridge's stoic performance? "Mostly I think it was the voice," Gaiman shared. "There was something about the way he delivered the lines, the thoughtful way he delivered the lines, the way he'd find the poetry and the beauty and the tune of the lines. It was wonderful. It was right."

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