Netflix Geeked Week: The Sandman Reveals Release Date, New Trailer, and Plenty of New Information

Sandman fans – it’s official! At today’s Geeked Week event, Netflix announced that their adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s classic comic will premiere on August 5th, just two months away. But that’s not all! Also revealed were a brand-new trailer, Mark Hamill as the voice of Merv Pumpkinhead, and a host of new teaser posters. Read on for our full coverage of all of the reveals and teases from today’s Sandman Geeked Week panel.

A Brand New Trailer

Perhaps the most exciting thing to come out of today’s event is the brand-new trailer. The trailer features our first real glimpses at Tom Sturridge’s Dream, Jenna Coleman’s Johanna Constantine, Boyd Holbrook’s Corinthian, and lots more. Fans of the comics will immediately recognize some of the scenes shown – from the destruction of the Dreaming to Dream’s escape from captivity, and lots more. For everyone else, there’s a lot here to get excited about. While still very much a teaser, we get our first glimpse at some of the season’s storylines. Namely, Dream’s quest to recapture the Corinthian, an escaped nightmare wreaking havoc throughout the human realm. And all of it looks beyond exciting.

Set to adapt the first two arcs of Gaiman’s comics, there’s a lot more to expect from Netflix’s The Sandman over the coming months. But for now, catch a glimpse at the new teaser trailer below.

Tidbits From the Panel

The bulk of today’s Sandman-related news came in the form of a panel hosted by Felica Day. Attending the panel were Neil Gaiman (executive producer), Allan Heinberg (showrunner), Tom Sturridge (Dream), Vivienne Acheampong (Lucienne), Boyd Holbrook (The Corinthian), Jenna Coleman (Johanna Constantine), and Vanesu Samunyai (Rose Walker). Throughout the panel, Heinberg, Gaiman, and the cast discussed what fans can expect from the show and much, much more. Read on for some highlights from the panel.

Mark Hamill as the Voice of Merv Pumpkinhead

Perhaps the biggest reveal to come out of the panel is that Mark Hamill is set to voice the character of Merv Pumpkinhead, a character who works for Lucienne at Dream’s castle in the Dreaming.

On casting Hamill, Heinberg said:

We were thrilled to be able to ask and get Mark Hamill to be the voice of Merv Pumpkinhead, and he’s fantastic in it, and he was such a pleasure to work with. Neil and I had a day with him on Zoom, and he could not have been sweeter. “Can I try this? Can I try that? What do you need? Let me do it again. I didn’t like that one.” I just, it just made me a new kind of fan of his, just, I loved him.

Gaiman added:

And his Merv is hilarious. That’s the other thing I think that needs saying. Merv was always, in the comics, on the one hand, a kind of comic relief, but on the other hand, also the voice of sanity, the voice of just going, “This is actually kind of nuts.” He gets to be that person, especially when arguing with Patton Oswalt’s Matthew, so much fun.

Vivienne Acheampong on Playing Lucienne Opposite Tom Sturridge

Acheampong discussed what it was like playing Lucienne opposite Tom Sturridge’s Dream, saying:

When I met Tom, he’s so lovely and warm and open, and then he just completely transforms into Morpheus and is incredible, and you can just tell that he really knows this character because he has just embodied him so beautifully, and it just made my job as an actor really easy. He’s a dream, no pun intended, but literally, as an actor, a dream to work with ’cause he just gives you so much, he’s so generous, so it was a pretty easy thing for me to do with him.

Boyd Holbrook on the Corinthian

Holbrook explained what drew him to the role of the Corinthian and how he approached portraying the fan-favorite character, saying:

The Corinthian is basically the metamorphous or… your worst nightmare in the matrix of the Dreaming, created by Morpheus. When I first heard about this in talking to my friends about it, they were like, “Oh, you’re gonna play The Corinthian.” And it seemed like a larger-than-life, really outrageous character, but the more I talked about it with Allan and Neil, it seemed like it was a person that you would welcome into your home, the sort of kindness and the ease that he would put you in, it was more Hannibal than like a flamboyant Joker character, and it was just very hard to calibrate being, you know, under these glasses and just how to, a lot of acting is done with your eyes, so that for me was something to adjust to.

Jenna Coleman on Johanna Constantine

Coleman elaborated on what appealed to her about the role, saying:

Just on the first reading of the script, it was the, the character just was so fleshed out, the voice, everything kind of came to me straightaway like a, the idea of her being this, you know, this lone kind of ranger in the world with this tough exterior and her cynicism and kind of wryness and wit to kind of not let anybody close. Yeah, quite a tortured, a tortured soul, like with a big, compassionate heart hidden somewhere underneath.

Vanesu Samunyai talks about Rose

During the panel, Samunyai teased what fans could expect from Rose Walker, saying:

So, Rose Walker is a regular 21-year-old who has lost her parents and she’s just alone in the world and she wants to find her brother, Jed. She wants a sense of normalcy back in her life. Along the way, she meets Morpheus and they work on, you know, trying to get that going, and Tom is, Tom is great, really great to work with, and what was really nice was how we played with Morpheus and like the relationship between them, the dynamic, how, and the change that Dream had over their interaction.

Allan Heinberg on Adapting The Sandman

When asked by a fan what fans, old and new alike, should expect from the series, Heinberg explained:

We wanted to give longtime fans everything that they loved about Sandman, reading Sandman, and then more, more. Things that they, you know, stuff that happens off-panel, you know, in the comic. Just a deeper dive into these characters’ lives and their feelings and their souls.
A lot of our cast were new to “The Sandman” too, so we couldn’t just operate within a fan bubble. We really needed to be able to tell this story for people who’d never read “Sandman” before, and it was a pleasure to introduce people to this world and these characters for the first time, so you really don’t need to have ever read the comics, but if you see the series and you enjoy it, we hope you’ll run out and start reading ’cause there’s a lot to enjoy.

The Most Difficult Scene

When asked by a fan what scene was the most difficult to film, Vanesu Samunyai replied:

It was in, I think episode eight, where I went into Hell’s dream, and I had to react to what I was seeing onstage. Because we hadn’t put the effects in yet and he hadn’t got a mask on yet, it was kind of hard to try and imagine what it looked like and how terrifying it was, so my reaction was a bit smaller than it probably would’ve if I saw that in real life.

Neil on What Makes The Sandman Grand and Intimate All at Once

When asked by a fan about how The Sandman is simultaneously grand and intimate, Gaiman said:

I think it has to be grand mostly because, at the end of the day, it’s 3,000 pages long, so at that length, you become an epic whether that was where you started out or not. But also, I think one of the things that I wanted to try and do when I was writing it was to tackle enormous beings, enormous ideas, and enormous time spans, but the only way that you can make anybody care about any of that stuff is by actually looking at human beings and what happens to them and people’s hearts and people’s minds, and what happens to those.
You know, Tom’s huge story as Morpheus would be so much less interesting without a Rose Walker, without a Johanna Constantine. You need what happens to them, and their influence on him is actually what drives season one. It’s all about change and it’s all about beings who are bigger and greater than gods and what they’re gonna become.

You can view the entire panel below:

New Teaser Posters

And last but not least, Netflix released a handful of new posters, teasing Dream, the Dreaming, Johanna Constantine, and The Corinthian. Sneak a peek at those posters in our gallery now!