Netflix's 'The Sandman' Casts the Rest of The Endless as Season 2 Approaches

Netflix has finally given The Sandman fans have long been asking for --- who precisely will be playing the remaining Endless in the highly anticipated second season of the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's comics classic.

The Endless, anthropomorphic personifications of various aspects of human reality, are the key immortal figures at the heart of the sprawling, genre-hopping story of The Sandman. In the series' first season, we met Tom Sturridge's (Irma Vep) Dream, Kirby Howell-Baptiste's (Cuprits) Death, Mason Alexander Park's (Quantum Leap) Desire, and, very briefly, Donna Preston's (Good Omens) Despair. (Though those who tuned in to spinoff Dead Boy Detectives got a closer look at her mirror-filled Grey Realm.)

Now we'll meet the final three siblings:

• Adrian Lester (Renegade Nell) is set to play Destiny, eldest of the Endless and ruler of The Garden of Forking Ways, a labyrinth meant to represent life's journey. Essentially the personification of fate, Destiny carries a book chained to his wrist containing everything that ever was, is, and will be. 
• Esme Creed-Miles (The Doll Factory) is Delirium, a shapeshifter who rules over the realm of sanity and madness. 
• Barry Sloane (The Bay) is The Prodigal, otherwise known as Destruction, the ruler of all things connected to ruination who abandoned his duties after man discovered science, knowing that it would lead to horrors like the atomic bomb. He now wanders the universe trying to escape his responsibilities.

The confirmation of Destiny, Delirium, and Destruction's involvement in Season 2 pretty much guarantees that one of the stories this set of episodes will be adapting is "Season of Mists," as that's the first point in The Sandman where we see all seven siblings together. 

Other than that, details about the show's second installment are being kept under wraps, but will likely cover several volumes of the comics story, as the first did. (Season 1 adapted elements from both Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House.)

Cast members returning for Season 2 include Patton Oswalt (What We Do in the Shadows) as Matthew the Raven, Vivienne Acheampong (Everything Now) as Lucienne, Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) as Lucifer Morningstar, Jenna Coleman (Wilderness) as Johanna Constantine, Ferdinand Kingsley (Silo) as Hob Gadling, Stephen Fry (Heartstopper) as Gilbert, Asim Chaudhry (The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin)  as Abel, Sanjeev Bhaskar (Unforgotten) as Cain, Razane Jammal (Doubt) as Lyta Hall, and Vanesu Samunyai as Rose Walker.

There's no release window as yet for The Sandman Season 2, but given Netflix's recent obsession with splitting their most popular series into groups of smaller batches of episodes (ostensibly to stagger their drop dates and stretch out the larger impact of and buzz around the shows) it seems safe to say a similar release schedule is in the cards for Dream and friends. But thanks to the genre-hopping, episodic nature of the series --- in which some stories often (occasionally? and also sometimes never?) intersect --- such a schedule would hardly be as damaging for The Sandman's larger narrative as it has proven for some others. Therefore, the smart money is likely on some form of late summer or early fall release for a handful of new episodes, with more to follow in 2025. 

The first season of The Sandman is currently streaming on Netflix.