With JGL now attached to the long-gestating film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's most famous work, we look at who could potentially take the difficult leading role.
It's the greatest comic book of them all, a hugely ambitious, multi-layered and textured narrative that interweaves different styles, characters, and worlds in both short, seemingly non-sequitur stories and a lengthy arc told over seven years in which those details that appeared trivial later become vital. It's a story about intransigence and change, about immortality, life and Death, about human impulse, about choice. Most of all, though, it's a story about stories. All of this is why, even in the era of the comic book movie, this most imaginative example of the medium, Neil Gaiman and Vertigo Comics' Sandman, has remained in cinematic Development Hell. Finally, however, the last couple of months have seen development on a plausible future Sandman film project. The Dark Knight Trilogy and Man of Steel writer David S. Goyer seems to have been given his pick of Warner Brothers' DC and Vertigo properties after the billions his earlier pictures brought in and has decided to have a go at Sandman. An actual finished movie really became a possibility last month when Inception star and Don Jon writer-director-actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt announced his attachment to the project. At the moment, Gordon-Levitt is only attached as a producer helping to develop the film, but the talented multi-hyphenate will inevitably look to play some further part as the film develops. The first great challenge Gordon-Levitt, Goyer and the rest of their team face will be to cast the eponymous leading man: Morpheus, Oneiros, the Shaper of Form, Dream of the Endless. It's a difficult role for any actor, a character that is above and beyond even the gods, changeless and yet ever-changing. Dream is a hero, but a massively flawed one. If they are struggling to find someone who fits the bill then, here's ten potential stars who could be the on screen Lord of the Dreaming.