Unless we're counting vanity projects like Moonwalker and Captain EO, Michael Jackson only acted in two movies in his entire life. He was Scarecrow in The Wiz in 1978, and he had a quick cameo in 2002's Men In Black II. Jackson wanted more. Every once in a while, we'll hear that Jackson tried to play Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace or that he pitched himself as the next James Bond. Now, with the long-gestating Netflix adaptation of the Neil Gaiman comic The Sandman finally out in the world, we're hearing that Jackson wanted to be in that, too.
People have been trying to figure out how to adapt The Sandman since the comic first appeared in 1989. Now, as IndieWire reports, Neil Gaiman is claiming that Michael Jackson wanted to play Morpheus, which is essentially the lead role of the whole story. (Tom Sturridge plays Morpheus in the Netflix show.) In a recent appearance on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gaiman told the story:
By 1996, I was being taken to Warners, where the then-president of Warner Bros. sat me down and told me that Michael Jackson had phoned him the day before and asked him if he could star as Morpheus in The Sandman. So there was a lot of interest in this, and they knew that it was one of the Crown Jewels, and what did I think? And I was like, ‘Ooh.'"
Given that Morpheus is an unearthly being, it's actually not that hard to imagine Michael Jackson in the role. It makes more sense than James Bond, anyway.
