every major casting decision and performance in Sandman (2022), ranked
yes I've seen the actual show now so this is an informed opinion
actually inspired choices
- Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian: It'd be easy to play the Corinthian as a purely grotesque character but Holbrook gives him exactly the right flavor of west coast gay sleazebag charm
- Mason Alexander Park as Desire
- Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne
- Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer: She's great! She knows exactly the level of camp this is supposed to be.
understood the assignment
- Tom Sturridge as Dream: It can't be easy to play the growly, glum author self insert in a terrible feathered haircut. He does it about as good as can be expected.
- Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death: This is a case where the comic book character is just so impossibly charming that I don't think a live actor is ever going to get a flattering comparison out of it, but she has the right level of cheerful energy.
- John Cameron Mitchell as Hal
- David Thewlis as John Dee: He's tapping into a long tradition of how to play escaped mental patients on television but he's solid.
- Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess: Square peg meet square hole
I guess this is fine
- Patton Oswalt as Matthew: Maybe it's because he's purely doing VO in this but he just doesn't quite hit the same tone as everyone else. It's like he's on a slightly different show.
- Stephen Fry as [redacted]: He's just too charismatic, too extroverted. I don't think the soft gentleness of the character comes through in this version.
oh no
- Jenna Coleman as Constantine: Constantine is iconically depressed, a man who's barely hanging on to his life and who keeps throwing himself at hell because dealing with his real problems seems worse. Jenna Coleman plays the character with basically none of that trauma or world-weary edge, essentially as an earlier and more naive version of the character. This would be a choice but she gets jobbed by the way the show is structured, which depicts her very put-together, sardonic, almost cheerful performance side by side with Constantine's big early backstory trauma. So even if you didn't have the preconception of what the character is from the comics, I don't think this works.