Netflix recently released the first season of their live-action adaptation of DC Comics and Vertigo’s The Sandman. It’s the first live-action adaptation to get past the development stage, with several versions to be shelved or canceled including one that would have started Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It turns out that a major star wanted to play Morpheus back in 1996. During a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, The Sandman creator Neil Gaiman revealed that legendary pop singer Michael Jackson called Warner Bros. and let them know that he wanted to play the character.
“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 told EW. “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.'”
While Michael Jackson and Gordon-Levitt’s dreams ultimately never came to fruition, Gaiman shared that he quickly came to realize that finding Morpheus wasn’t as simple as he initially thought when it came time to cast for the Netflix series.
“I was like, ‘It’s going to be so easy to cast! We just find, you know, an English-speaking actor with great cheekbones, there’s loads of them out there,'” he joked. “We saw, in the end, about 1500 Morpheus auditions.”
Michael Jackson wanted to play Morpheus in THE SANDMAN. Yup, you read that right.
Watch the full #happysadconfused with @neilhimself here: https://t.co/04iXe0GGvp pic.twitter.com/vrchzPHAsU
— Josh Horowitz (@joshuahorowitz) August 26, 2022
It would have been so cool to see Michael playing Morpheus as he had the perfect body type and bone structure and I think he would have killed it!
