Gaiman offered input from afar
nothing happening in the distance, no moving car lights or people walking. It feels like you’re in a depopulated city at 3 o’clock in the morning, and that’s because we were in a depopulated city at 3 in the morning. It added this strange, dreamlike quality to everything that we shot.”
Gaiman was actually stuck at his home in New Zealand during production, but Heinberg communicated with him daily.
“There were no creative decisions that Neil wasn’t a part of,” Heinberg said. “That was the best. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time, so to step into a work of art that I love with the person who made it is beyond a dream come true.”
That included keeping the show faithful to the comics’ pioneering inclusiveness, with a diversity of races and sexualities. Nonbinary performer Mason Alexander Park was cast as the nonbinary Desire.
“As a young, gay comic book reader, ‘Sandman’ was the one place where I felt seen and loved,” Heinberg said. “That was an enormous part of its appeal to me; there just wasn’t anything else in popular culture, especially comics, like it.
Especially from a writer who wasn’t gay, who had no gay agenda, so to speak. So yes, we just tried to make ‘Sandman’ today what it always was.”
For his part, Gaiman — whose “Lucifer” character and prose novels “Good Omens” and “American Gods” have recently been turned into series — TV is the place to be.
“I’m incredibly lucky,” he said. “It’s been fun so far, and ‘Sandman’ is the most fun of them all.”
Having participated in both “Sandman” and “Irma Vep” — a series about a different kind of dream activity, making movies — Sturridge elaborated on how ambitious narratives have found their best filmed format.
“What’s glorious about television and long-form narrative now is it offers the opportunity to tell the story that Neil Gaiman wrote — and that Neil’s now made,” the actor said. “We’ve finally gotten to a stage where television has the support of artists, producers and financial people to make these extraordinary long-form stories come to life.”