Tom Sturridge speaks to Esquire Middle East about crafting the look and voice of The Sandman
For any actor, figuring out a new character is a challenge. Trying to bring to life a character you’ve spent most of your life thinking about can be even harder.
That was true for Tom Sturridge, the 36-year-old English actor and star of the most popular show in the world at the moment, Netflix’s The Sandman, who spent years obsessing over the Neil Gaiman comics on which the show is based, getting the job both because of that fandom and, of course, his remarkable skill, only to find himself dumbfounded on how to actually portray him.
“When we started doing camera tests, as a fan, all I wanted to do was literally realize the images that were in the graphic novels. So we painted my skin as white as A4 paper, we put black contact lenses in my eyes, I had wild huge hair, and the extraordinary costumes made by Sara Arthur, and, and it was perfect. It was a perfect representation,” he tells us.
But that version just didn’t work–and even had people gawking at him in the streets because of how ridiculous it looked.
“They were like ‘whoa! What are you wearing!’ Sturridge tells us.
Sturridge also struggled to get the voice right, thinking at first it must be dark and gravelly, before Gaiman, who also serves as the co-creator of the show, revealed how exactly he should sound.
Read and watch our full conversation with Tom Sturridge below.
Esquire Middle East’s interview with Tom Sturridge
Esquire Middle East: Morpheus is such a difficult character to nail down. Sometimes he’s heroic, sometimes he’s a rat bastard. How did you wrap your head around that and come to some sort of understanding of how to portray him?
Tom Sturridge: Initially, I was lost. I didn’t know. I think you’re absolutely right, there is an extraordinary breadth of expression inside of him.
What’s amazing about Sandman as a whole is it’s this enormous world in which you spend so much time with him, and his complexity only increases. As a fan of it, as you are, I was aware of all the directions that he goes in. I had to kind of bring it back to the beginning, and ask myself what is it that he does, what is his responsibility.
I realized that the key is he contains within him the collective unconsciousness of the universe, our dreams, our fears, and our fantasies and that in doing so, he knows how each and every one of us feels. And therefore, the first thing that does is create a quality of empathy and must do, but it’s such a kind of unsafe, dangerous, entity, that unconsciousness, that it requires an exquisite discipline to contain it.
I think the withheld, isolated, closed-off creature that we’re presented with is born of having to hold that feeling, because the consequences of not doing so would be catastrophic.
What did your conversations with Neil Gaiman help you figure out about how to portray him?
Tom Sturridge: The first questions I had for Neil, were, what does he look like? And what does he sound like? Which may sound counterintuitive because it there are a litany of images of him in these books.
But when we started doing camera tests, as a fan, all I wanted to do was literally realize the images that were in the graphic novels. So we painted my skin as white as A4 paper, we put black contact lenses in my eyes, I had wild huge hair, and the extraordinary costumes made by Sara Arthur, and, and it was perfect. It was a perfect representation.
But the thing that Neil said was that if Morpheus walks down the streets of New York or London, no one should notice him. Perhaps they feel a presence, he should blend in with all humanity. And so I would walk down the corridors of Shepparton and people would be like, ‘Whoa, like, what are you wearing?’ You look like—whatever. And so it didn’t work.
It took a long time. It took multiple camera tests to get to a place where Neil was like, Tom, you look sickly pale anyway, your hair is always messy, and I can see the cosmos in your eyes. [Laughs]
How did you go about crafting Morpheus’s voice?
Tom Sturridge: I don’t know about you, but when I see those white capital letters in the black speech bubbles for Morpheus, I do hear something. There’s a power to them. And Neil was very specific and said that he is the voice inside of your head. He is the voice that invites you to sleep and guides you through your dreams. And that was really helpful. Because, you know, at the beginning, I was like, ‘he should be Terminator!’ And that cleared that up very quickly.
The Sandman is now streaming on Netflix