Netflix Reveals The Devil Is A Woman In Upcoming Sandman Series

JB Augustine |

Jan 29, 2021

Just as speculation Taron Egerton is playing John Constantine in the series started to simmer, the main cast of Netflix’s adaption of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, including the portrayers of Dream and Lucifer, have been revealed.

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Netflix UK released a poster full of black-and-white images of the cast and wrote in a tweet, “THE SANDMAN – a new dark fantasy Netflix series based on the comic book series created for DC by Neil Gaiman. Starring: all of these great people…”

These “great people” are the following:

Tom Sturridge — Dream
Vivienne Acheampong — Lucienne
Charles Dance — Roderick Burgess
Asim Chaudhry — Abel
Sanjeev Bhaskar — Cain
Boyd Holbrook — The Corinthian
Gwendoline Christie — Lucifer

Have a better look at the full cast below.

Your eyes don’t deceive you, Gwendoline Christie (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) actually plays Lucifer – aka The Devil, Ruler of Hell, and Lucifer Morningstar. That means, of course, a character with a long history in film, literature, and world religion is gender-swapped, just as Gaiman promised.

While the Lucifer in Sandman is an interpretation, he has always been depicted as a male figure ever since the time of the Old Testament. Beyond the Vertigo comics, Peter Stormare played him in 2005’s Constantine with Keanu Reeves. And Tom Ellis picked up the pitchfork in the Netflix series that bears the fallen angel’s name.

The Devil in each iteration is based on the same source material but Gaiman and series EPs Allen Heinberg and David Goyer are hellbent on working from a clean slate. Sandman will be a reboot set apart from everything else we’ve seen so far.

Gaiman will be walking a fine line with that and could very well run into criticism or charges of hypocrisy for changes he’s allowing when he stuck up for fidelity to source material in the past.

Chiming in on a Twitter thread involving Rhianna Pratchett – daughter of The Watch creator Sir Terry Pratchett – last October, Gaiman wrote, “Yes. But the fan base are fans. And they like the source material because it’s the source material they like. So if you do something else, you risk alienating the fans on a monumental scale.”

How alienated fans will feel, if at all, when they see how Gwendoline Christie does as the Ruler of Hell is anybody’s guess at this point. Gaiman, meanwhile, is pretty confident she is the right choice.

“Casting Lucifer was a delight,” he tweeted yesterday. “I’m so very glad that @lovegwendoline is the Ruler of Hell in Sandman on @netflix.”