Netflix has revealed the first footage of Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer in its upcoming adaptation of The Sandman. The footage comes via the new trailer for Netflix Geeked Week 2022. Christie is technically playing the same Lucifer Morningstar that Tom Ellis played in the (those worlds are connected, after all). This Lucifer first appeared in The Sandman comics as the ruler of Hell before leaving for Earth, which is where the Lucifer spinoff comic book (the basis for the Lucifer television show) began. The scene in the trailer is straight out of the comics, where Dream (Tom Sturridge) must travel to Hell to reclaim one of his missing artifacts of power, his helm.
Neil Gaiman, the writer of The Sandman, previously explained why they cast a new actor in the role of Lucifer instead of bringing Tom Ellis back. “The theology and cosmogony of Lucifer is a long way from Sandman‘s,” Gaiman said in response to a fan’s question on Tumblr. “It’s ‘inspired by’ Sandman, but you can’t easily retrofit the Lucifer version to get back to Sandman, if you see what I mean. It seemed easier and more fun to have the Sandman version of Lucifer be, well, much closer to the Sandman version of Lucifer.”
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Speaking to the press about Audible’s , Gaiman explained that he’s approaching the Netflix show as if he were writing Sandman for the first time in the 21st century. That means updating the timeline, reconsidering certain storylines, and reimagining certain aspects of certain characters.
“[D]oing the Netflix TV series, we’re very much looking at that as going, ‘Okay, it is 2020, let’s say that I was doing Sandman starting in 2020, what would we do? How would we change things? What gender would this character be? Who would this person be? What would be happening?’” he said. “For Netflix right now, people have tried making some movies and TV adaptations for 30 years, and actively tried making them for 25 years, and they’ve never worked. And they never worked because of all the special effects and what would be needed to do the special effects. They never worked because you were making something that was adult. People would write Sandman movie scripts, and they go, ‘But it’s an R-rated movie, and we can’t have $100 million R-rated movies.’ So, that wouldn’t happen. You needed to get to a world in which long-form storytelling is an advantage rather than a disadvantage. And the fact that we have seventy-five issues of Sandman plus — essentially, 13 full books — worth of material, is a really good thing. It’s not a drawback. It’s on our side. And the fact that we’re in a world in which we can take things that only existed in comic book art, and that can now exist in reality.”
The Sandman debuts on Netflix in 2022. Netflix Geeked Week takes place from June 6th through June 10th.
