Michael Jackson so desperate to play iconic comic book character he took drastic action

Michael Jackson was such a huge comic book fan he once tried to buy Marvel in the 1990s well before Disney. The King of Pop was an especially big fan of Spider-Man, but during that decade there was a DC Comics character he really wanted to play on the big screen.

It turns out that Jackson was a huge fan of The Sandman comics and the protagonist Dream aka Morpheus, one of the seven Endless.

Author Neil Gaiman, who has recently released the long-awaited Netflix show, shared the extraordinary story of MJ’s ask.

Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said: “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 shared how The Boat That Rocked actor was the first of four he’d received via email from Lucinda Syson.

The Sandman creator said: “I figured that, at the end of a couple of weeks, we’d have a shortlist of five or ten just as good as him, just as right as him, just as — you could say the lines as well as him — and we didn’t. At the end of a week, we had Tom. At the end of two weeks, we had Tom. At the end of a month, we had Tom. At the end of six weeks, we said to Warner Bros: ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’”