While Dream has been drawn by a great variety of artists, he has a fairly defined appearance (essentially a more imposing, goth-ier avatar for his creator who once described himself as: "a messy-haired white male author trapped inside the body of an identical white male author with perhaps even less tidy hair"). However, this, even in-universe, is merely a construct. It is Dream's appearance to people who expect him to appear that way. To a cat, he looks like a cat. Therefore, although this list has generally abided by the classic look of the character, the movie's casting directors have no real requirement to do so if a better actor comes along. When Gaiman first wrote Neverwhere as a TV series, the actor Paterson Joseph won the part of the Marquis de Carabas, the series' most appealing character, despite the fact that most of the auditioning actors were white. Gaiman has shown that getting the right actor is more important than skin colour and it's hard to think of many better potential Dreams than the actor who played the Marquis opposite Cumberbatch in the radio Neverwhere: David Harewood. Having already played a morally complex mythical character in a Gaiman adaptation, Harewood definitely has what it takes to play Dream and, thanks to a regular role on acclaimed TV drama Homeland, his profile has been raised enough that he could get the part, whilst not being such a big star that audiences come with too many associations. Like Cumberbatch, Harewood has played Frankenstein's monster in live performance and is an accomplished stage actor. If Hiddleston's Shakespearean talents are a good qualification for giving him the part, then that counts equally for Harewood. His current performance as Oberon in a visually inventive staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect demonstration of this. The play features in one of the best known Sandman stories and the character of the fairy king shares a lot of similarity in his haughty observation and manipulation of humanity's dreams and desires with Gaiman's Dream.
