'The Sandman' Season 2 Casts Freddie Fox as Loki

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman was a triumph for Netflix in filming the unfilmable when the first season arrived in the summer of 2022. While the series itself falls squarely in the "British-ish" fantasy category along with shows like House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the first season was a showcase of PBS favorites, including Jenna Coleman (Victoria), Arthur Darvill (World on Fire), Sanjeev Bhaskar (Unforgotten), Charles Dance (The Jewel in the Crown), Roger Allam (Endeavour), Derek Jacobi (I Claudius), and Ian McNiece (Doc Martin), to name a few. In May 2024, Netflix revealed several more lead cast members who would join the show's second season. Now, the roster of guest cast for the show's forthcoming season has been released, and once again, it's a who's who of British talent.

For those who are unfamiliar with Gaiman's seminal work, The Sandman, the installments of which were published between 1989 and 1996, was the comic book series that the term "graphic novel" was created to describe. It is considered the series that took comics from the dime store teen reading the genre had been consigned to and proved that the medium could be high art and great literature rolled into one. However, it is a comic book series; to that end, it is a collection of short stories. (This is one reason The Sandman has always been considered unfilmable, due to the disjointed nature of the overall tale.) 

Netflix's significant achievement was in recognizing that it should film these stories as stand-alone tales. Season 1 covered Issues 1-8, Preludes & Nocturnes, and then skipped ahead to The Doll's House, Issues 10-16, though not quite in that order. A month later, it then separately released two minisodes for the first two Issues of Dream Country Issues 17 and 18 (Calliope and Dream of a Thousand Cats). By treating each story differently, adapting it as it required, rather than trying to adapt each the same way, the series sidestepped a lot of roadblocks it would have otherwise never been able to solve.  

Season 2 has already confirmed it will cover stories adopted from three volumes of the comics: Issues 21-28 Season of Mists, Issues 32-37 A Game of You, and the other two issues of Dream Country, 19 and 20. Season of Mists takes Dream to Hell, where he runs into various gods: Norse, Egyptian, Japanese, Christianity, etc. That's where some of our most significant casting announcements lie.

• Freddie Fox (Slow Horses) is Loki, the god of chaos. Loki is a charming, seductive shape-shifter. The smartest and most dangerous person in any room, Loki is utterly irresistible and never to be trusted.
• Clive Russell (Sherlock Holmes) plays Odin, Thor's father, and Loki's blood brother. He is a longtime ally of Dream’s but finds himself driven to desperate extremes in his efforts to stave off Ragnarök. 
• Laurence O’Fuarain (The Gentlemen) is Thor, the storm god. With his hammer, Mjollnir, Thor is brusque, rude, and driven entirely by his appetites for food and drink, battle, and sex.
• Ruairi O’Connor (The Morning Show) is Orpheus, a poet, musician, oracle, an idealistic, romantic young man — and very much his father’s son — until tragedy strikes and reveals to him the true nature of love.
• Ann Skelly (The Nevers) is Nuala, and Douglas Booth (Pride & Prejudice & Zombies) is Cluracan, royal emissaries from the court of Faerie. Nuala and Cluracan are siblings who are opposites in every way. Nuala is responsible, empathetic, and principled. Cluracan is an impulsive rogue who lives for pleasure. They disagree about everything except their devotion to each other.

Meanwhile, another one of the Dream Country issues, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," is expected to be given a prominent place in Season 2. Issue 19, it received a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991, and is regularly cited as the issue of The Sandman that took the series from comic to graphic novel. Naturally, the principal character in it is Puck, Shakepeare's favorite fae. Jack Gleeson, who rose to fame as Joffrey in Game of Thrones and has been looking for a role to reintroduce himself to audiences ever since will be taking on that role.

Cast members returning from Season 1 will include Tom Sturridge (Being Julia) as Dream, 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, David Thewlis (Fargo) as John Dee, Ferdinand Kingsley (Silo) as Hob Gadling, Kirby (The Good Place) as Death, Stephen Fry (Heartstopper) as Gilbert, Mason Alexander Park (Quantum Leap) as Desire, Asim Chaudhry (The Completely Made Up Adventures of Dick Turpin) as Abel, Sandra James-Young (EastEnders) as Unity Kincaid, Donna Preston (Good Omens) as Despair, Razane Jammal (Doubt) as Lyta Hall, John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) as Hal, Niamh Walsh (Jamestown) and Joely Richardson (The Tudors) as Young and Old Ethel Cripps, and Vanesu Samunyai as Rose Walker. 

Also returning are the aforementioned PBS favorites Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess, and Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain.

The Sandman Season 2 does not yet have an official release date but is expected to arrive (probably in multiple parts) in 2025.