Though he doesn’t actually feature to a great degree in Neil Gaiman’s source material, hard-drinking Leprechaun Mad Sweeney is easily one of the most popular characters from American Gods. On the upcoming Starz TV adaptation, Sweeney will be played by Pablo Shreiber (if he looks familiar, that’s because he starred as the vile “Porn Stache” on Orange is the New Black), and he’s the focus of the latest character promo.
The footage is brief, but we see Sweeney dazzle an increasingly frustrated Shadow Moon with some truly magical coin tricks, before the ex-con grows angry and demands to know how his new red-headed friend is accomplishing such wondrous feats. You’ll notice that we then get a shot of Sweeney smiling through bloodied teeth, and that’s because at one point in the book, Mr. Wednesday manipulates Shadow into a fist-fight with the much larger Old God, and the ramifications of their scrap are felt throughout the remainder of the story.
Because there’s only one novel (not counting the Anansi Boys spinoff), fans have been curious about how many seasons of American Gods we’ll see. Right now, it’s difficult to say, but the show has already added a few characters that didn’t appear in the source material (including Corbin Bernsen’s Vulcan), so there’s a decent chance that they’re planning to expand the mythology beyond the book.
Bryan Fuller’s highly anticipated, small screen adaptation of American Gods is set to premiere on Starz on Sunday, April 30th at 9:00 PM. In the meantime, you can check out the new promo up above along with some recently released character posters down below.
