Warning: Spoilers to follow.
The Sandman has finally become a reality after landing on Netflix last week. The show follows Neil Gaiman’s comic book character, The Sandman, otherwise known as Morphius or Dream, one of the Endless. The storytelling follows a somewhat dream-like approach, focusing on various characters in different episodes and without having one clear arch over the whole series. One episode focuses on the exorcist Constantine, but this version was not as fans of the comic might know them. Spoilers will be included in the below explanation.
The character of John Constantine is well loved in the DC comics, the cynical, bi-sexual, cursed, chain smoker having amassed a fandom of his own. He has also had his own film 2005’s Constantine (played by Keanu Reeves) and television series (played by Matt Ryan). So why wasn’t he used in the Netflix series? Instead, the episode Dream a Little Dream of Me features Johanna Constantine played by Jenna Coleman. Like her counterpart, Johanna is snarky, cynical, and also bisexual, struggling to maintain relationships thanks to her cursed profession, but there are also differences.
Any change to a story that fans know and love is tricky to get right and, as with any adaption, the show made a few changes, including bringing down the size of the titular character’s famous hairdo, to gender-bending characters like Lucifer, played by Gwendoline Christie, and Lucien now Lucienne, played by Vivienne Acheampong. However, thanks to the fanbase the character John Constantine has already amassed, many wonder why the show also changed the well-loved character. Some claim it’s “woke casting” whilst others believe that perhaps the rights to John Constantine made it tricky to bring him into this adaption.
For Gaiman, it wasn’t about being “woke” or even about the ownership issues of the character, according to The Sandman creator it was about storytelling and the economy of filmmaking. Speaking to Slash Film about the creative decision the writer said
“It was economy. It was the economy of filmmaking. We started ‘Sandman’ going — anybody watching ‘Sandman,’ we are going to go, ‘You are starting here. This is the first place. You are not expected to have brought any knowledge with you.’ When I wrote ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me,’ ‘Sandman’ issue 3, I knew everybody knew John Constantine. He had his own comic, ‘Hellblazer.’ I wanted to bring some of his readers into ‘Sandman.’ Later on, I had an enormous amount of fun creating Johanna Constantine, his ancestor, and having her appear a couple of times, and it was really nice and solid.”
Something else to bear in mind is that Johanna was created by Gaiman for the comics whereas John was created by Alan Moore. In the comics, Lady Johanna Constantine is an 18th-century adventurer and aristocrat and John’s ancestor, who first had a run-in with Dream in a pub where he had been meeting with Hob Gadling, an immortal human, every hundred years. This scene was adapted for the series as well and saw Coleman play her own ancestor. Gaiman discussed the casting of Coleman, finding it easy to have her play both ancestor and descendant.
“When we looked at what we were going to do in this whole series, we knew that we were going to have Lady Johanna Constantine meeting Dream in a pub. And if we’re going to do that and we want a really classy actress to portray her, then we’re going to have to give that actress more to do than just meet him once in a pub. Given that there really weren’t many women in the beginning, the idea that we could find one person and have them do both, just seemed nice and straightforward. “
Though they swapped John for Johanna, much of the storyline from the comics remain the same thanks to making her bi-sexual. The character’s relationship with Rachel is the same, and the storyline involving Dream’s sand also follows that of the comic books.
Though Gaiman was unaware of this fact when deciding to use Johanna instead of John, there were some issues regarding the rights to the character. Currently, the character is already in production for an upcoming HBO Max show, Justice League Dark, which will see John Constantine as a central character assisting the Justice League on their mission. The rights for John Constantine belong to J.J. Abrams’ production house Bad Robot. Gaiman confirmed that this was not the issue that prompted the change whatsoever.
“Later on, I was told there were all sorts of restrictions about using Constantine and that J.J. Abrams had brought these things in, and people were going, ‘Ah! You must be doing that because of this,’ and I wish I could say, ‘Well, yes, we wanted John Constantine,’ but no. But actually, the truth was, we talked about that [during] the initial — sitting and having dinner before we pitched it to Netflix and everybody, that was one of the things that just sort of seemed to make sense. It was big and obvious that we were going to [cast a woman].”
So, according to Gaiman, the main reason for the change was simply for the sake of storytelling. The creator has been exceptionally happy with the portrayal of the character by Coleman, stating she “is the best Constantine so far.” Fans have also fallen in love with the romantically tragic character, with many calling for her own spin-off series. Hopefully, if the second season is greenlit, we will see more of her character then. And as Dream has shown us, nothing is stronger than hope.