Working on The Sandman was a baptism by the fire for the lead actor Tom Sturridge, who had played Dream. Right from the get-go, he recalls getting locked, alone and naked, in a glass sphere, where we find Dream at the story’s beginning.
Morpheus’ imprisonment, which is at the hands of the power-hungry “Roderick Burgess” (Charles Dance) — who wants to capture Death which can be used in bringing back his dead son — the plot stretches up to the entire first episode. The occult ritual misfires and he accidentally ends up summoning Death’s brother, Dream, instead. And their Dream remains trapped, powerless and naked, for over a century.
In words of how the episode was filmed, what you see is what you get. Tom Sturridge had spent over a month staring blankly out of his cage. “Being a human, if you are put in a glass box and kept there, you can begin to feel what the character must’ve felt in a way that’s much more specific,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
The character Not only had to sit in there, staring at Charles Dance’s Roderick Burgess yelling at him now and then, but once the filming had wrapped up for the day, it took a while for him to exit. “Breaking up the sphere took a half-hour,” he explained. “So I would just sit there, and it was certainly a meditative, contemplative time for the long stretches of the day.
Especially when you’re naked, which on the opening days of a shoot is indeed a welcome to the crew.”
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