James McAvoy, star of the new Audible adaptation of The Sandman, reveals the comic book storyline that haunted him as a teenager. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is held in high esteem as one of the greatest comic book series ever written. A timeless dark fantasy set within the realm of storytelling and the dreams that inspire creativity, The Sandman earned significant acclaim and strong sales, and the even won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for issue #19, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
While various film and television adaptations have failed to emerge from development limbo over the decades, an Audible Original version of the series is out now, featuring an all-star cast bringing the Neil Gaiman’s classic stories to life. Gaiman himself is involved with the project, even lending his voice to the role of The Narrator, while McAvoy, Kat Dennings, Michael Sheen, Bebe Neuwirth, and Riz Ahmed are just a few of the famous voices lending their talents to the audio production.
Related: The Sandman’s Gender Representation Was Ahead Of Its Time
While promoting the Audible release of The Sandman, McAvoy spoke to Screen Rant about his past experience with the franchise. When asked about his favorite Sandman story, he stopped short of citing a specific tale as his “favorite,” but he did talk about reading the series as a young teenager in Glasgow, Scotland. There was one storyline in particular that chilled him to the bone, and it involved the fan-favorite embodiment of humanity’s darkness, The Corinthian. McAvoy recalls:
The whole thing with The Corinthian and the whole thing with him at the “torturers’ convention,” that was just terrifying when I was a teenager, when I first read it. And the speech that Morpheus has, I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but where he says, “you guys think you’re special, but you’re just nothing.” It’s incredible, it’s so good. I read it when I was 14, I think.
In The Sandman mythos, The Corinthian was created by Dream of the Endless as a representation of the darkness that hides within every human, a way for people to see, understand, and come to terms with their own dark side. Unfortunately, this creation was a failure, as it only sought to sadistically murder people. McAvoy is referring to Sandman #14, in which Dream confronts his misbegotten creation at a “Cereal Convention,” which turns out to be a punny euphemism for a gathering of serial killers who mingle and share stories of their heinous crimes like a twisted take on Comic-Con. As for The Corinthian himself, his appearance is striking and continues to horrify each new generation of readers who recoil at the sight of his eyes, which are absent, replaced by eye-sized mouths. Thankfully, he usually wears opaque sunglasses. These stories had an impact on McAvoy, and led to him reading other works by Gaiman:
I suppose that’s what then led me on to reading Neil’s work: reading American Gods, reading Good Omens, and Neverwhere, and all that, when I was in my teens. Good Omens blew my mind. He wrote it with Terry Pratchett. Yeah, I was a fan!
The new Audible Originals adaptation of The Sandman features Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, Rogue One) as the voice of The Corinthian and is out now. The initial release contains the first three volumes of The Sandman graphic novel, from the beginning through to the end of the Dream Country arc.
