This morning Netflix unveiled the trailer for its upcoming Geeked Week fan event, and while you can watch that thing in its entirety above — and we also covered that this morning — right now I want to focus on something specific: The first footage of Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer Morningstar. (You know, the devil, Satan, ruler of hell, etc etc etc.)
The clip comes hear the end as we see images of Lucifer standing in front of a crowd of demons in hell, then directly — and very friendly — addressing Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) asking, “are you well?”
You can skip directly to minute 1:35 if you want to watch it above right now, but for your convenience here are some screenshots:
Very mild spoilers ahead.
You don’t know if you haven’t read “The Sandman,” but for those who have, this is a pretty huge deal. For the uninitiated — I promise this barely qualifies as a spoiler — the things that happen in this scene will later have literally cosmic repercussions. Which is to say, Netflix revealed one of the most consequential moments in the entire series in passing. Good flex.
(But again, not a spoiler, unless you’re the sort of person who thinks “magical Dream person meets up with Satan” is a NBD situation. And I know you’re not.)
Christie’s always great of course and here she really nails the kind of otherworldly detachment that Lucifer has when we first encounter him in the comics. Neil Gaiman and artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg based their version of Lucifer specifically on “The Man Who Sold the World”-era David Bowie, making the decision to ignore gender when casting the role even more fun.
Anyway, Now’s a good time to once again confirm that yes, Lucifer is also the main character of a different Netflix series, and, yes, Christie’s Lucifer and the one played by Tom Ellis are, technically, the same character. But of course, due to various and complex rights issues, “Lucifer” had zero connection to anything from “The Sandman” aside from certain characters and concepts included with the rights.
Christie’s Lucifer is of course going to be extremely different Tom Ellis’ version, and judging from the video above, far more faithful to the comics. (Not that faithfulness is an indicator of quality of course. We’ll have to see how well it works when the show premieres.)
Now for some more specific spoilers. Stop reading if you don’t want to know.
If you’re wondering what’s up in the scene above, here’s the gist: After spending decades imprisoned by a weird British occult society, Dream escapes and discovers that several items of his magical property have been stolen. He needs them not only to recover from his ordeal but also because they contain his power, and he needs that to repair the damage done to The Dreaming over the decades of neglect.
So Dream has to travel to various places and planes of existence, including hell, to retrieve them, where he’s forced to do something that embarrasses some of the more fashionable residents. And well, hell is a terrible place full of terrible, easily pissed off people, so you can guess this doesn’t leave Dream in the best spot.
“The Sandman” stars Tom Sturridge as Dream, Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, Christie as Lucifer; Sanjeev Bhaskar and Amid Chaudry as Cain and Abel; Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess; Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne; Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian; Mason Alexander Park as Desire; Donna Preston as Despair; Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine; Niamh Walsh as Young Ethel Cripps, Joely Richardson as an older Ethel Cripps; David Thewlis as John Dee; Kyo Ra as Rose Walker; Stephen Fry as Gilbert; Razane Jammal as Lyta Hall; Sandra James Young as Unity Kincaid; and Patton Oswalt as the voice of Matthew the Raven, Dream’s trusted emissary.