Yahoo News Cats and Calliope: Neil Gaiman and The Sandman directors break down that bonus episode
It's no dream: The Sandman really did drop another episode two weeks after the first 10 premiered on Netflix. That's pretty unusual for the streaming platform, which usually releases a whole season in one go, but The Sandman co-creator Neil Gaiman says it was baked into the plan he, showrunner Allan Heinberg, and producer David S. Goyer had for the series from the beginning.
"It was David Goyer's suggestion, but we immediately embraced it," Gaiman tells EW over Zoom mere hours after the episode's surprise release. "We were just about to pitch the show to streaming platforms, and the decision was made that we were going to be pitching 11 episodes. We would do 10 episodes, and then there would be an 11th, a special that no one would know about. That's what everyone knew they were buying. It also meant we could begin the process for those stories very, very early on."
Netflix Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) as a great black cat on 'The Sandman'
A Thousand Cats
The new episode adapts two stories from the Sandman comic: "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope." The first, which follows a young kitten (Rosie Day) to a gathering of cats where a feline storyteller (Sandra Oh) preaches that the world was once ruled by their kind until humans banded together and dreamed a different reality into existence, is the first animated segment in the Sandman show. It was directed by Hisko Hulsing, who previously handled the animated sequences in Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck and oversaw the Amazon Prime Video animated series Undone.
"It's different from the comic," Hulsing tells from his studio, surrounded by big, gorgeous paintings and concept art from other projects. "The comic is very graphical, and what we're doing is mixing these old painting techniques with modern animation techniques. That's my style now."
Since "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" is animated, all the acting is done via voic-eover. That allowed for something of a crossover between different versions of The Sandman. In a fun treat for longtime fans, the voice cast for this episode includes multiple actors from the Audible audio drama.
James McAvoy, who played Morpheus in that version, here voices the prophet who inspired other humans to dream our world into being; Michael Sheen, who voiced Lucifer, plays one of the human cat owners along with his Good Omens costar David Tennant; and Gaiman himself, who narrated Audible's Sandman, voices the skull-headed crow who directs Oh's cat through the Dreaming.
But don't worry: This may not be the last you've seen of those actors, if Netflix renews The Sandman for more seasons.
"I'd been working with David Tennant and Michael Sheen on Good Omens anyway, so that was a no-brainer. They're both in The Sandman because they love The Sandman," Gaiman says. "The main thing was that we had to promise both of them that if they lent their voices to this, it didn't mean that they couldn't come back and actually be in the Sandman TV show later. This wasn't their one chance. They both needed to be reassured of that."
Netflix Richard Madoc (Arthur Darvill) takes the muse Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut) from Erasmus Fry (Derek Jacobi) on 'The Sandman'
Calliope
The second story in the bonus episode, "Calliope," is a dark interrogation of the creative process. The title character (played by Melissanthi Mahut) is one of the Muses of Greek mythology, whose beauty inspires storytellers to create great works of literature and art. After being enslaved decades ago by the unscrupulous writer Erasmus Fry (Derek Jacobi), she is traded to young novelist Richard Madoc (Arthur Darvill) so he can finally get over the writer's block that's haunted him ever since he published his wildly successful first novel.
Gaiman says the story was inspired by his own struggle with writer's block while working on the comic.
"It came out of writing a story that didn't work. The Sandman #17 was meant to be a story called 'Sex and the Violets,' and it was going to be about Puck, grown old, running a brothel of demons," Gaiman explains, referring to the character from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. "But I couldn't get it to work. I was on a deadline, and I realized I had only managed five pages in two and a half weeks. I had a week left to write something, and this was dead on the page. I thought, let's just go into writer's block. Let's strip everything down: What's this story going to be about? It's about muse abuse. Okay, I can do that. I wrote it very fast, and it just came into focus."
"Calliope" is a story about abuse. Getting inspiration from a Muse involves having sex. Traditionally this is done through seduction and romance, but as Fry hauntingly tells Madoc, "I found force to be most efficacious." Madoc's rape of Calliope is not depicted on screen, but instead shown through the document on his computer screen — which goes from frustrating blankness to overflowing with popular new stories.
"Melissanthi and I worked together to make sure her character had dignity," says "Calliope" director Louise Hooper, who also handled the show's 10th episode. "I'm hard-wired to make sure that all performances of women in my shows are strong and intelligent. I don't want people to be pleading, begging, crying, or acting submissive. I was very careful with how I shot her eye line, to make sure she and Arthur Darvill were equal in frame."
Hooper continues, "I'm not crazy about directing sex scenes in general, let alone horrific ones. For me it's about the emotion of the scene, and you understand the implication of that. It's all about that shot going down to his computer, because that's the ego, that's the ambition, that's his insatiable thing he wants. We're not shying away from it; we're adults, we know what this is, we don't need to see it in this particular instance."
Netflix Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) and his former lover Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut) on 'The Sandman'
Unfortunately for Madoc, Calliope is a former lover of The Sandman protagonist Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), who does not react kindly to hearing of her imprisonment. Not only that, they also had a son together, and that son is very important to the overall arc of The Sandman. His name is Orpheus — maybe you've heard of him?
"I had the benefit of having Neil's entire Orpheus saga in my head, and knowing that we have every intention of adapting it if we're allowed to," Heinberg says. "Being able to work on this story, knowing where we're going with it and what their trauma was as a couple and as parents, it allowed us to write those scenes with as much grief and depth as possible."
Heinberg adds, "This is a side of Morpheus that doesn't show up anywhere else in our first season. The nice thing about casting Melissanthu, and the chemistry they have, is you believe they were together and that they loved each other and still do. You believe they were the parents of this child. That was surprising to me, how much power those scenes had."
Morpheus' late entry to this story is typical of The Sandman comics, which sometimes barely feature the title character. As Heinberg previously told EW, the TV team worked hard to better integrate Morpheus into stories like The Doll's House where he hardly features in the comic version. So for viewers who aren't familiar with the comic, this episode gives a taste of the kind of impact Morpheus can have even with limited screen time.
"Because we deprive Morpheus for as long as we do, his impact is sort of doubled," Heinberg says. "You get used to not seeing him in the episode, and the Fates basically tell Calliope he's not going to show up for her, so I hope it carries a nice charge for the audience when he's suddenly back in his own TV show."
"A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope" are two of the self-contained stories collected in the comic's third volume, Dream Country. If and when The Sandman gets renewed for more seasons by Netflix, might we expect to see another of those stories (the one based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Puck actually enters the story) get adapted?
When EW asks Gaiman, a scream comes from off camera. It's Gaiman's youngest son, exclaiming, "Did someone say A Midsummer Night's Dream?"
"Someone did say A Midsummer Night's Dream, my small son," Gaiman replies.
Clearly we're not the only ones excited for future possibilities! For now, all 11 episodes of The Sandman are streaming on Netflix.
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