On June 25, 2009, died Michael Jackson, one of the most acclaimed and talented artists that the music scene has seen throughout its history and who, in his half-century of life, has not only limited to revolutionizing the entertainment of the music industry, but trying, almost always successfully, other artistic facets. And the interpretation has been one of the most experienced throughout his career.
What does MJ do in The Sandman?
First of all, it must be said that The Sandman, which became a mass phenomenon thanks to the premiere of the original series on Netflix this summer, is a comic that began to be published in 1989 thanks to the work of Neil Gaiman and which at the time, it attracted the attention of production companies to serve as the basis for films or series. And remember that a quarter of a century ago, streaming platforms were still a pipe dream.
Well, 25 years ago Warner Bros had the idea of taking The Sandman comics and turning them into a TV series and one of the names that came into it was Michael Jackson, the singer , composer and choreographer who in those 90s he swept the sales charts with extraordinarily influential albums such as Dangerous or HIStory.
That’s what Neil Gaiman himself confessed in a statement to a podcast, Happy Sad Confused, in which he just recalled that “in 1996 they took me to Warner, where the chairman of the time […] He sat me down and told me that Michael Jackson had called him the day before to ask if he might play Morpheus in The Sandman. […] So there was a lot of interest in it, and they knew it was one of the crown jewels. And what did I think of it? I was like, oh! »
Although this project never came to fruition, the author of The Sandman himself confessed that this was not the last time he heard from Warner that they intended to cover his work. A film was also on the table, although it never materialized due to sabotage by the author himself, who admitted to going to the production company’s offices and imploring them ” please don’t do Sandman” (was the project they had in mind so bad? mind?).
And who is Morpheus?
Also known as Sueño, he is the protagonist of The Sandman and the central plot axis of the comic strip that Neil Gaiman made in the late 1980s and through 1993. According to this tradition, Morfeus is one of the Seven Eternals, personalities that embody different aspects of life and that they are incredibly powerful and ancient, even more so than the very gods humans worship.
For the Netflix series, the person in charge of giving life to this same character was Tom Sturridge, a British actor, born in London, and who has already participated in films such as Far from the madding crowd, On the road, Undercover radio , Waiting Forever and TV dramas like Irma Vep and Sweetbitter.