Michael Jackson. Photo by Constru-centro via Wikimedia Commons
The road to a filmed adaptation of Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman, first published in 1989, finally came to an end with a Netflix series that premiered this month. With a timeline like that, there's bound to be at least one or two surprising pitches for the show that never came to fruition, and Gaiman revealed one on a recent episode of Josh Horowitz’s podcast Happy Sad Confused.
As flagged by IndieWire, Gaiman claims that in the mid '90s, Michael Jackson expressed interest in playing the role of Morpheus, the protagonist of The Sandman series. The role eventually went to Tom Sturridge.
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. 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's worth noting that Gaiman's "Ooh" is more disdainful of the idea than curious, which is fair for a number of reasons. Watch the clip below.