The Sandman: Neil Gaiman Pitches Perfect Delirium Fancasting Idea

Ever since the word went out that EP & co-writer Neil Gaiman (Good Omens); EP, co-writer & showrunner Allan Heinberg (Wonder Woman); and EP & co-writer David S. Goyer‘s The Sandman would be returning to tell more tales (though maybe not in the typical season structure), there’s one big question mark that fans have been waiting to have answered. Who will portray Delirium, the personification of all delirium & sanity, Dream’s (Tom Sturridge) youngest sister, and the youngest of the Endless? That question has led to some fan-casting camps pushing for one person or another to get the role. And one way they’ve gone about getting their point across is by hitting up Gaiman on social media. So much so that Gaiman came up with the “perfect” idea on how to “Highlander” the options to a single person. When asked if it was cool for fans to cast Delirium, Gaiman responded, “Of course. I’m starting to think that the various Delirium fancast factions need to bring their favourites and get together in an abandoned castle, where they will battle until there is only one clear surviving winner, for us to cast in ‘Sandman.'”

Here’s a look at Gaiman’s tweet pitching his Delirium fan-casting idea – but a word of caution. Netflix is going with a version of this route with Squid Game… and that’s reportedly not exactly working out the way that they hoped. That said, the streamer is kicking off its live-streaming today. Hmmm…

Here’s a look back at Gaiman’s video message screened during the Netflix session at CCXP 2022 in December 2022, followed by a look back to a previous time when the franchise creator addressed the Delirium casting buzz:

In a tweet from the beginning of November 2022, Gaiman clarified that casting for Delirium (or any other additions) hadn’t started yet and that when they do, it runs through Lucinda Syson first:

Neil Gaiman on The Sandman Season 2 Gameplan & Beyond

“Well, we told the first 400 pages of a 3,000-page arc in the first 10 episodes. So there’s a kind of a “you do the math” on that. But then the other answer is, how long is a piece of string? What we know that we would like to do, in a perfect world, as long as the audience is there and people come out for it and people want it, is we want to tell the whole story of ‘Sandman’ that went through to ‘The Wake.’ And after that we want to tell ‘Sandman: Overture,’ and somewhere in there, possibly, even as a special or whatever, we’d love to do things like ‘The Dream Hunters.’ We quite probably weave the stories that are in ‘Sandman: Endless Nights’ into the body of the whole. What is nice is we have the entirety of ‘Sandman’ to draw on,” Gaiman explained during an interview with Variety. when asked how much time/seasons would be needed to tell the complete story of “The Sandman” universe.

Gaiman continued, “We also have the ‘Death’ books. It might be great to go off and do one of those as a sideline, in addition to which, anybody who has seen ‘Sandman’ Episode 3 has sidled over to us at some point or other in the last six months and said, ‘Do you think there’s any possibility that we could do a Johanna Constantine show with Jenna Coleman?’ And, oh my God, she’s a star, and you just want to see her going through battling demons and destroying other people’s lives. So that’s in there, too. We can keep going on this for a long time to come. But this isn’t us going, it’s eight seasons exactly and then out — or five seasons and out. We want to tell the story. Which feels wonderfully familiar for me because when I was writing ‘Sandman,’ people go, ‘So how long does ‘Sandman’ go?’ And I’d go, ‘I don’t know, maybe Issue #50?’ And I’d be at Issue #50 and go, ‘I don’t know, Issue #75, maybe?’ But when you get there, there’s still be more story to tell after that.”