Netflix has made its first casting announcement for the upcoming The Sandman series. Tom Sturridge (On The Road) will play the title role of Dream of the Endless, an anthropomorphic personification of creativity itself, while Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones, Star Wars: the Force Awakens) will costar as Lucifer.
Warner Bros. has been bouncing a film adaptation of DC Comics’ The Sandman around Hollywood for years. Joseph Gordon Levitt was on board to produce and potentially star, at one point. In 2019, HBO declined to pick up the series (due to the “massive price tag,” according to Hollywood Reporter) and Netflix stepped in to produce an 11-episode season.
Joining Sturridge and Christie are Vivienne Acheampong (The Witches) as Lucienne, a female version of Dream’s loyal librarian Lucien; Boyd Holbrook (Logan) as the nightmare the Corinthian; Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) as Roderick Burgess, a human magician; and Sanjeev Bhaskar (Yesterday) and Asim Chaudhry (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) as Cain and Abel, respectively.
From these roles, it seems reasonable to expect that Netflix’s series will cover the first arc of The Sandman, in which Dream frees himself from decades of imprisonment and goes on a quest to retrieve his items of power that takes him to Hell and back.
The Sandman is also currently being adapted into audiobook form. Audible announced on Thursday that the series would return for second and third seasons.