In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, Norse god of mischief Loki teams up with the faerie Puck to steal a baby conceived in the Dreaming, seemingly with no greater goal in mind than having fun and causing trouble for Dream of the Endless. But when showrunner Allan Heinberg brought the characters to the screen in the second and final season of Netflix’s The Sandman, he decided he needed to flesh out their relationship and motivation.
“It was one of my favorite things about this part of the series,” Heinberg told Polygon in a Zoom call. “We fulfill all the beats of the comic, but in a way that let me know so much more about who Loki is and who Puck is, and why they do what they do. […] Each of them has sort of a moral core, even though they behave in ways that from the outside could appear to be immoral or anarchic. Loki very much believes that his purpose is to wake people up to reality, to wake them out of their delusion, and Puck is there to hold a mirror up and [speak] truth to power and all of that stuff.”
Like in the comic, the show introduces Puck (Jack Gleeson of Game of Thrones) at a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) has staged for the court of Faerie, while Loki (Freddie Fox of Slow Horses) is part of a delegation of Norse gods asking Dream for control of Hell as a way to avoid Ragnarok. Loki uses an illusion to avoid being taken back to his prison beneath the World Tree, and Dream agrees to keep his secret in exchange for a future boon.
The two tricksters eventually hook up and cause trouble at the Vatican before taking the baby Daniel Hall as a way both to fulfill Loki’s favor to Dream — who wants Daniel to be his heir — and a way to get back at Dream, since they do it in a way that sets Daniel’s mother on a path of vengeance. The differences between how they view taking care of a baby become a source of both comedy and relationship friction.
“If you’ve got two trickster figures with ambiguous sexualities and a baby, I just immediately went, ‘Well, these are just gay dads,’” Heinberg said. “I knew I needed to make the relationship emotional. I knew I wanted to root for them as a couple. […] Babies are tricky on television. The way to make the audience care about this baby is to make the lead characters care about the baby. Once they became a romantic couple with the baby, the arc just sort of wrote itself.”
Gleeson took a long break from acting after playing Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones, but Heinberg said the actor had no reservations about portraying a babynapper on The Sandman.
When I approached him about it, I basically said, ‘We don’t have any villains on The Sandman,’” Heinberg said. “I really would love for the audience to sympathize with the people who serve as Dream’s antagonists and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, because for most of the show, Dream is the antagonist in all of these other characters’ lives and stories. So I think Jack was a fan of the comics, and really intrigued by it.”
The complete second season of The Sandman, episodes 1-11, are now streaming on Netflix. The bonus episode Death: The High Cost of Living will be released on July 31.
Source：https://www.polygon.com/tv/617117/sandman-netflix-loki-puck-gay-dad-romance
