A whopping 75 issues of comic book collection as source material and millions of fans who have devoured every inch of all the graphic novels— that’s Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. If you think adapting The Sandman would be easy, think again. And if that’s a task, we cannot fathom how massive the challenge would be to embody the titular character. So hats off to the English actor, Tom Sturridge, who had some big shoes to fill. He plays Morpheus/Dream/Sandman in the Netflix live-action rendition of the epic comic series. 

How did Tom Sturridge become Dream?

While a director is the captain of the ship for a show or a movie, it’s the actors who anchor it. Every cinematic masterpiece needs the perfect cast. And the showrunners of The Sandman definitely left no stone unturned to get one. Neil Gaiman, the author of The Sandman comics and the show’s executive producer, recently shared about recruiting Tom Sturridge.

By Neil’s own admission, “Tom was in the first email we got from casting, and we went ‘oh my gosh, Tom is the best, Tom is magnificent.’” While they obviously couldn’t just cast Tom Sturridge without giving the others a fighting chance, they “saw 1500-2000 Morpheuses, and there was no one who was Tom.” Sturridge was probably destined to play the often misunderstood entity.

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Tom definitely had his hand full playing a complicated being like the Sandman. But his love for the comics made him take up the challenge despite being “cripplingly afraid.” In an exclusive interview with Newsweek, Sturridge admitted, “It was enormously daunting, it was frightening even. Frightening because I am one of the people who regards this [comic book series] so highly, I care about it intensely, it’s so important to me as a piece of literature.

Who is Morpheus?

Morpheus, or the Sandman, is one of The Endless. They are a family of seven fantastical and immortal characters who are also the anthropomorphic manifestations of forces of nature, like Destiny, Dream, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Morpheus is the personification of dreams and the ruler of the realm known as The Dreaming. 

He is a shape-shifter that controls the dreams and nightmares of every mortal and immortal being in both worlds. Morpheus also has magical abilities, including teleportation and the power to alter reality. The story of The Sandman follows Morpheus’s quest to regain his powers and control of his realm after this century-long imprisonment.

What do you think of Tom Sturridge as Morpheus? Watch The Sandman, now streaming on Netflix, and let us know your thoughts.