Michael Jackson Asked to Be in ‘The Sandman’ TV Adaptation, Neil Gaiman Says
variety.comEthan Shanfeld In 1996, Michael Jackson paraded the globe with the HIStory World Tour, playing 82 shows for over 4.5 million fans.
But that same year, the King of Pop apparently had his sights set on an entirely different gig: playing Morpheus in a television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman.” “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 on Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast. “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.’” Over the last few decades Gaiman received several offers to adapt his sprawling comic book series for the screen, but “The Sandman” finally got the TV treatment this year on Netflix, topping the streamer’s global charts for three consecutive weeks.
The Netflix series stars Tom Sturridge as Morpheus alongside Gwendoline Christie, Jenna Coleman, Boyd Holbrook, Mason Alexander Park and Kirby Howell-Baptiste.
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