Netflix’s Sandman Series Begins Filming, Neil Gaiman Teasing Casting Announcements

As teased in September, the filming of Netflix‘s adaptation of The Sandman, the seminal DC Comics series written by Neil Gaiman, is now underway. Gaiman confirmed on Twitter that filming began on Thursday. He tweeted, “Oh, we started shooting on Thursday. Dr John Hathaway has brought a book from the museum in which he works, to Roderick Burgess. But you’re right, it’s going to be time to announce some casting soon.” Gaiman’s tweet describes the opening scene of The Sandman #1, in which museum curator John Hathaway, under duress, delivers a book to occultist Roderick Burgess. Burgess uses the knowledge in that text in his attempt to capture Death of the Endless. He instead captures Dream, setting The Sandman‘s story into motion.

As for the second part of Gaiman’s tweet, Netflix hasn’t announced any of the series’ cast despite beginning production. It seems those announcements are coming soon. One rumor suggests that Tom Sturridge is the frontrunner to play the lead role as Morpheus. At the same time, another report says Netflix is eying Liam Hemsworth and Dacre Montgomery to play a different key role, the rogue nightmare called The Corinthian.

Before coming to live-action, The Sandman saw its first adaptation as an audiobook exclusive to Audible. Gaiman ahs said that where the audio adaptation is unwaveringly faithful to the original comics, the Netflix adaptation will modernize the original story.

“Doing 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 said.

He continued, “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.”