The Sandman Reveals First Look at Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer

DC FanDome has already brought a slew of new details surrounding upcoming DC Comics projects, including movies, television shows, comics, video games, and more. While the event already included an impressive lineup of titles, there were also some surprises along the way — including a new look at Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of The Sandman. In particular, the series debuted the first official look at the series’ incarnation of Lucifer, who will be portrayed by Game of Thrones and Star Wars fan-favorite Gwendoline Christie. In a series of teaser posters, which you can check out below, fans can see Christie herself in costume, as well as the character’s set of angel wings.

Christie is the latest actor to portray the role of Lucifer, after Tom Ellis portrayed a loosely-inspired version of the character on Netflix’s eponymous series. 

“The theology and cosmogony of Lucifer is a long way from Sandman‘s,” Gaiman said on Tumblr of the two incarnations. “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.”

The cast of The Sandman also includes Tom Sturridge as Dream, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess, Asim Chaudhry as Abel, Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain, Mason Alexander Park as Desire, Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, Joely Richardson as Ethel Cripps, David Thewlis as John Dee, Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian, Stephen Fry as Gilbert, Patton Oswalt as the voice of Dream’s raven Matthew.

“[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?’” Gaiman explained to ComicBook.com.

“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,” Gaiman continued, referring to Sandman‘s long journey to live-action. “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.”

What do you think of the first look at Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer in Netflix’s The Sandman? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!