Living the Dream
DQ steps onto the otherworldly set of The Sandman to hear from showrunner Allan Heinberg, the cast and the creative team about bringing gods, Hell and magic to life for the second and final season of the Netflix fantasy series.
“Everything is, ‘How are we going to do that?’”
In the middle of the shoot for the second and final season of Netflix’s fantasy epic The Sandman, Allan Heinberg is facing regular challenges. But the showrunner of the Neil Gaiman adaptation is visibly relishing the task.
“How are we going to take Dream [Tom Sturridge] and Delirium [Esmé Creed-Miles] on a road trip across America when we’re at Shepperton? How do you shoot Croydon for New York? Last season we were in Bournemouth for South Florida. We got away with it somehow. Nobody asks, ‘Why are we in an Elizabethan tent performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream while there’s a demon banquet going on down the hall?’”
Heinberg is sitting in his Shepperton Studios office early in February 2024, long before allegations of sexual abuse against (and denied by) Gaiman emerged. Yet even during our conversation, it is apparent that Gaiman was by that stage as much sounding board as anything else – still involved, but at a remove. The decision to end with season two was also, Heinberg told Entertainment Weekly in May, made three years ago.
With such fertile source material and a defined end, it means the second season is every bit as ambitious as the first, bursting with bold ideas, enticing casting and imaginative worldbuilding.
Debuting in 2022, The Sandman introduces the title character, Morpheus, also known as Dream, who emerges from years of imprisonment and must journey across different worlds and timelines to fix the chaos brought on by his absence.
Now in season two, after a fateful reunion with his family, Dream must face one impossible decision after another as he attempts to save himself, his kingdom and the waking world from the epic fallout of his past misdeeds.
“There’s nothing like walking onto a set like this to remind me that, as an actor, I am nowhere near the most important person,” laughs Sanjeev Bhaskar, returning as the fratricidal Cain to Asim Chaudhry’s guileless Abel. And the brothers are taking centre stage for the scene DQ is here to watch.
Having been summoned by Destiny (Adrian Lester) for a meeting with his Endless siblings and absorbed the unfathomably significant – and spoiler-heavy – consequences, Dream is attending a banquet in Hell. Cain and Abel’s magic show is the entertainment; the food includes intestines (aka carved dark red pears) and eyeballs (painted lychees and cherries); and assorted otherworldly figures including Faeries, Norse gods and the Clown Brigade have gathered to persuade him to hand over the keys to Hell. Bhaskar is asked by series director Jamie Childs to “practice his sawing action” as he prepares to cut his brother in half; this he does with alarming relish.
“We’re remixing a lot of the story from the comics,” says Heinberg. “We weave in and out of flashbacks so we get to know the characters, crafting the narrative while both being faithful to the spirit of the comics and thinking, ‘How do we bring as many people to the show as possible?’”
Heinberg explains that it is a combination of technological advances and the advent of streamers – with bigger budgets and flexible episode lengths – that have made The Sandman not only possible but successful. Even so, as many effects, sets and props as possible are handmade, practical and used in camera.
“The demands of the show are beyond ridiculous,” says Heinberg. “But somehow our teams make it all look gorgeous and easy.”
We are taken on a tour of the sets by production designer Gary Steele and set decorator Liz Griffiths. These range from Dream’s private quarters to his library to a New York apartment. Griffiths succinctly explains the sheer strangeness of their assignments: “We do a lot of Ancient Greece this year, so I’ve dotted amphoras and lyres around various sets. It has that continuity. Recently, we were in the French Revolution and had to somehow get a 10-foot guillotine into Hampton Court Palace. The next week, we were in Elizabeth I’s throne room, which just happened to have an IBM computer in it. It’s a juxtaposition every week.”
“Almost every project I worked on until the last few years had a hospital, a police station and a loft,” grins Steele. “We’re not doing any of those, so it’s great. All this wild stuff, and on such scale.”
He taps the Gates of Hell themselves with affection. “We had the sculptor sculpt three or four different panels of writhing bodies and skulls for this. I wanted spears and daggers coming through it. It came out pretty well.”
Costume designer Sarah Arthur later walks us around hundreds of costumes which, she explains, have to take into account Childs’ vision of this as a dark world. “We tend not to do anything too glaring,” she says. “Colour is great to use and we do bring bits in, but more often it’s textures, something that will pick up the light. With Dream, I try to bring in a dark colour that isn’t black, or something with texture going through it, a striped sash or leather work. But every day is different.”
Later on, DQ joins two of Arthur’s finest co-creations: Freddie Fox’s anarchic, monstrous Norse chaos god Loki and Douglas Booth’s libidinous, hard-drinking leprechaun Cluracan, both of them hoping to seduce Dream into handing over the keys to Hell. Booth likens his louche look, all leather, snakeskin and open necks, to “sexy medieval glitz”; Fox, with eye-catching blonde mohawk, invokes Billy Idol and David Bowie, while both baffled and enchanted by a secrecy around the project that extends even to its cast.
“It seems quite du jour to keep the actors in the dark about scripts for as long as possible,” he says amiably. “I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but you work it out quickly. Alan is such a generous spirit and good communicator that, after an hour’s meeting, I felt like I’d read four versions of every draft that have still yet to be written. I’m not complaining!”
Booth, meanwhile, is enjoying working with lead actor Sturridge, whom he first met on 2017 feature Mary Shelley. “Tom’s really found something in this part. He holds himself in such a way that I swear he just floats across the set. I don’t know how he does it – maybe he has wheels on the bottom of his shoes?”
But amid all the hocus pocus, the epic fantasy and era-hopping adventures, what makes the series connect is heart. The first part of S2 launches on Netflix tomorrow, with the second half following on July 24.
“When fantasy stories or films haven’t connected, it’s never because the special effects weren’t good,” notes Bhaskar. “It’s because there’s something that didn’t make it feel emotionally viable. You have to have that emotional connection to it, and humour as well, otherwise it’s a series of images.”
“It’s about what it means to be human,” adds Heinberg. “When we sold the show to Netflix, part of the appeal was that it was essentially a family soap, a relationship drama. Last season was about Dream realising he’d made mistakes. This season is about trying to make things right, and the cost of that to the point where he has to decide to protect himself or the people he loves. It’s a more personal, intimate and emotional season. I’m very proud of it.”
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tagged in: Allan Heinberg, Asim Chaudhry, Douglas Booth, Freddie Fox, Gary Steele, Liz Griffiths, Neil Gaiman, Netflix, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Sarah Arthur, The Sandman