00:00 There are no small players in this.
00:03 That's what's unbelievable about this production.
00:05 Because it made me cry not once, but twice.
00:08 It's the thing you least expect.
00:10 You just feel honoured to be a part of.
00:12 I know that sounds a bit cheesy.
00:14 As soon as it was sent my way, it was like a complete no-brainer.
00:18 And to be honest, just a joy.
00:19 What are you doing here, Etty?
00:22 He's coming, Inni.
00:24 Yeah.
00:26 What's the biggest misconception about Morpheus?
00:31 I think there's a misconception about Morpheus as...
00:34 He certainly is brooding and dark.
00:37 But I think there's a misconception that his isolationism
00:41 and his withdrawn, contained qualities
00:46 are because he doesn't feel.
00:50 I think that he, in containing inside of him
00:54 the unconsciousness of the universe,
00:56 in containing inside of him all of our,
00:58 every sentient being's dreams,
01:01 he knows exactly how each and every one of us feels.
01:05 And therefore, I think, is an extraordinary empathetic being.
01:10 But the discipline required to hold that energy inside of him
01:15 and avoid the catastrophe that sort of,
01:18 that miscontrolling it would cause,
01:21 means that he has to be rigorous and controlled.
01:26 But I do think that inside him,
01:29 there's this extraordinary vivacity and life.
01:35 Yeah, I mean, so, so, I mean,
01:37 similar to Doctor Who in terms of we explore many worlds,
01:41 realms, states, travel, but, yeah, I mean, so, so distinctive.
01:47 I mean, I was very, it's very,
01:50 we're talking very much about how hard it is to describe Sam,
01:53 and it's so distinctive and so unique.
01:56 And as soon as, and Neil Gaiman, I'm obviously such a fan of,
02:00 so as soon as it was sent my way,
02:01 it was like a complete no-brainer.
02:04 And to be honest, just a joy.
02:06 Like, the character is so formed on the page, so complex.
02:10 I like her.
02:11 Like, she's hilarious.
02:13 And like, she's unlike other characters that I've played before.
02:18 And she's cynical and she's dry.
02:20 And she's, there's a lot of emotional complexity going on.
02:24 She's a lone warrior in the world,
02:27 and tortured and wounded, but hilarious and pragmatic.
02:34 And obviously getting to play Lady Joanna Constantine as well,
02:37 and kind of having the link between those two characters,
02:40 but also being relatives, but Lady Joanna Constantine,
02:45 having a very different kind of cold, cunning calculation.
02:50 And a very different relationship, I think, with Dream as well.
02:54 It's, no, I think it's one of the real pleasures
02:58 of the way television and film have developed in the last 20 years,
03:01 is that you do get these really exciting projects
03:04 that you just feel honoured to be a part of.
03:07 I know that sounds a bit cheesy, but the Sandman is, for most people,
03:12 one of the masterpieces in graphic novels of the past 30, 40 years.
03:17 And I was, because I've known Neil for some time,
03:19 I know how much it means to him,
03:22 and how much it meant to get it right.
03:25 You know, there was, it reminded me of how my friend Douglas Adams,
03:30 with his Hitchhiker's Guide, if only he'd lived another 10 years,
03:34 they really could have done it properly.
03:37 The technology, but not just the technology,
03:39 the budget and the will to make things properly,
03:42 give them due care and attention, is at a high pitch at the moment.
03:47 And so it's a kind of easy call, I found.
03:50 The only reason we even exist is to serve them.
03:55 I think I'd have to point to the whole of episode six,
04:00 because it made me cry.
04:03 Because it made me cry not once, but twice.
04:06 Once during the death scene when we meet Harry,
04:10 and once right at the end of Men of Good Fortune,
04:13 when Death and Hob get together in the pub.
04:16 And that took me by surprise each time.
04:20 I'm sitting there thinking, I wrote these words.
04:23 I plotted this out in 1988.
04:25 This has been part of my life, these stories, ever since.
04:30 I read and reread them every time I had to,
04:34 you know, we reprinted them or I was checking the colour
04:37 or anything like that.
04:38 I know them like the back of my hand.
04:42 And yet, watching this thing that we've shot
04:47 is bypassing all the thinking bits of my brain
04:50 and is going straight into the emotion bits.
04:53 And I can't believe that's happening.
04:56 And there was so much pride in what Alan,
05:01 in what the actors had done, in every part of that.
05:05 I mean, you look at the pub every hundred years
05:10 and look at production designers,
05:13 costume designers and costume makers.
05:15 Everybody came in to give us that
05:18 for what, in the end of the day,
05:19 is about half an hour of television.
05:23 We shouldn't have been able to do that, and we did.
05:26 What Kirby Halbaptiste brings to Death
05:30 in just making you go, "Oh, yes, when I die, I hope you're there.
05:35 You'll make things better. It'll be OK."
05:39 That thing, I don't care that it took us a thousand auditions
05:46 to get to Kirby, because we got Kirby at the end
05:51 and it's like, "OK, that thing is the thing that we wanted."
05:54 That feeling of speaking truth,
05:56 that feeling of being the person at the end
06:00 that you love and you care for,
06:02 the person you would like to imagine
06:06 was there for your child, for your parent,
06:09 for your sibling, for your loved one at the end.
06:13 I thought about giving up,
06:15 but I have a job to do it, and I do it.
06:19 What I think is beautiful about all of our episodes
06:24 is whether you see a character for a single episode
06:27 or for multiple, each of these episodes stands alone.
06:31 They're almost like short films.
06:33 So, you know, there are no small players in this.
06:39 It's absolutely not about screen time in something like this.
06:43 There is a magnitude and a weight to every single character
06:47 that is in The Sandman, and fans of The Sandman will know that.
06:50 And new fans, people who have figured out Sandman
06:54 through this show will see that,
06:56 that every single character, no matter how long you see them,
06:59 has such weight.
07:01 So to me, it is a case of absolute quality over quantity.
07:08 And thinking about the representation of Lucifer,
07:15 I mean, like Kirby's been saying about portraying death,
07:18 it's a concept, you know, Lucifer is the epitome of evil.
07:22 But for me, what the comics did so beautifully
07:25 was that they presented a very human quality.
07:30 So you believed that was a person.
07:32 You could see it.
07:33 You could see all the complexities and the conflicts,
07:36 the internal conflicts, the wonderful thing that Neil does so well,
07:39 which he just turns things on their head.
07:41 It's the thing you least expect.
07:44 And I wanted to be really, we all did,
07:47 wanted to be really faithful to the comics.
07:49 But at the same time, it was thrilling to be able to
07:53 actually bring my interpretation, what the comics had given me,
07:58 what had fired in my imagination through reading them,
08:01 through talking to Neil, looking at Neil's original source material,
08:05 and also looking at my own range of material.
08:08 And Lucifer's a part I played before on stage years ago,
08:13 and I'd always wanted to revisit it.
08:15 This was like a kind of glorious opportunity
08:18 to explore something about evil,
08:21 which is extremely relevant in our modern world.
08:24 Tell us what power of dreams in hell.
08:29 No, but it really was.
08:31 That's what's unbelievable about this production,
08:33 is that everything, I mean, beyond the impossible, was built.
08:39 So the first thing that came to my head was hell.
08:42 It was extraordinary to be inside Lucifer's lair.
08:46 And that floor was stone.
08:49 Those columns were marble.
08:51 The murals were painted on the walls.
08:53 The fire burnt your face.
08:55 And it's such a difficult thing when you do a job like this,
08:58 the kind of leaps of imagination that are required.
09:02 And what was so special was that the production design team
09:07 and everyone involved made those leaps so much smaller
09:12 than they needed to be because they made it.
09:16 And, yeah, I mean, the first thing that came into my head was hell.
09:21 And there wasn't genuinely, I don't think,
09:25 one piece of green screen in that sequence that I worked with,
09:32 other than, like, maybe sitting outside a window or something.
09:35 And that was just-- it's just--
09:38 it's incredibly easy to tell the truth when you can touch the truth.
09:43 Yeah, it's a gift. It's really amazing.
09:45 In my case, selfishly, we went-- we were down in Surrey, I think it was,
09:51 in a sort of quarry for one of the final scenes of episode 10
09:55 where I get turned into something that is a spoiler alert.
10:00 And it was on one of the hottest days we had that year.
10:04 It was not the hottest day.
10:05 And as you probably noticed, I wear an entirely green, thick tweed waistcoat,
10:10 coat, and cape, and hat, and moustache.
10:15 And I-- it was very hard to think of anything
10:18 other than wanting to dive into an ice bath.
10:21 So the secret is, "Oh, the agony, gentlemen, ladies,
10:27 the agony of having to perform."
10:30 Didn't you find that? But we coped, didn't we?
10:32 Because we have very kind people giving us fans.
10:35 But you-- and you had some great locations to work in as well.
10:38 Yeah.
10:40 We-- the first location that we filmed at on my first day,
10:46 which was the scene where we arrived in England to see Unity.
10:52 And it was a gorgeous, gorgeous big building.
10:55 And I think that was just-- it was so nice to just, like, look at it.
10:59 I love old buildings, so it was just the right-- real treat.
11:02 I just had the weirdest dream.
11:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]
11:10 you
11:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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