1 Sep - Although Tom Sturridge is now considered the perfect Morpheus to Netflix's "The Sandman" series, did you know that Michael Jackson had previously expressed interest in the role as the Lord of the Dreaming? That was what author and "The Sandman" creator Neil Gaiman shared in a recent interview on Josh Horowitz's podcast, "Happy Sad Confused", stating that the conversation happened during the many times that Warner Bros. tried to adapt the once unadaptable comic series. "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 said. "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.'"
It is safe to say that Jackson did not get the gig in the end, with his last film being "Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls" (2004).
In a previous interview, Gaiman admitted that he had spent the last 30 years rejecting bad ideas for a movie adaptation for the comic series, including one that featured Dream, Lucifer, and the Corinthian as triplets attempting to find Dream's tools before the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile, Netflix successfully developed "The Sandman" series, which stars Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death and Mason Alexander Park as Desire among others.