The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
petimetrek asked: What if they finally casted Idris Elba as Crowley? I think you said time ago that you liked him for that role.
Now that it’s been announced that Good Omens is real, and that I will actually have some say in casting, we move into a sort of a huge I can’t say anything about casting zone. I can’t say who we are interested in or not interested in. I can’t say who we want. I can’t say how we got the people we will get.
( Given that no casting has even begun to begin, I do not mind writing this next bit. But wouldn’t dare in a few months because by then some of these would be true. ”Well, X wanted to do it but was already overcommitted this year, Y turned it down as too weird, Z said yes but only if we could move shooting three months later and we couldn’t do it, and Q said yes, but he was already signed up to do a movie then, and we couldn’t risk it, and S said yes if we could pay him twice as much as anyone had ever got for doing TV before and if we could also guarantee that 15% of our special effects budget would be spent making his neck look younger, which was why M, who was nice and sane and available, seemed like a perfect bet…”)
So now, it’s all, wait, and as people are cast, we will tell you, when the time is right. Make your dreamcasts and post them and enjoy them, and, bearing in mind that we cannot cast all of the people you want as Crowley and all of the other (or the same) people you want as Aziraphale, we will try not to let you all down.
For the record, I was lying. We were plotting something.
And all the things we were plotting are now coming to fruition.
So, for the record, this was the day we had lunch with the BBC and it became apparent that we really were going to make Good Omens. At that point, we were still looking for a writer. It would be six months before Terry told me that I had to do it and we decided that the writer had been found.
So I lent my friend my mainland Chinese copy of Good Omens, and she’s been commenting on various stuff in the book to me as she read along. One day she messaged, “Crowley’s so cute, chasing after the hedgehogs like that.”
And I said, “……………..what?????!?”
So she told me where in the book it was, and it was the part after Cr&Az realized that Warlock isn’t the kid, talked to the nun, and got out of the hospital. It did say that Crowley was “trying to hit a hedgehog and missing”, but I soon realized that the “second line” she told me that’s about the hedgehog is, “The angel stared out at the rushing hedgerows.” Apparently the Chinese translator read “hedgerows” and thought it was “hedgehogs” again. Obviously it didn’t make a huge change to the plot line, but basically, in the Chinese version of Good Omens, Crowley chased a hedgehog while convincing Aziraphale, “drove in silence for a while”, and then chatted with Aziraphale some more. Meanwhile Aziraphale saw everything but decided to let Crowley do his thing.
So…yeah.
You know, between life and what’s happening in politics and work and too much travel and missing my baby son (he and Amanda are at a conference in Canada and I am hiding to try and make a deadline) it’s been a rotten week.
This, for the record, suddenly made everything really good. It may be my favourite ever Tumblr post.
Here are the illustrations I did for uni based on ‘Good Omens’ by Terry Pratchett and @neil-gaiman! It’s an amazing book and an endless source of inspiration for an illustrator like me!
I wrote about everything that’s happened in the last few months, and also clarified something about GOOD OMENS that had been misreported in the last few days…
Adaptation of the 1990 comedic fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
This week, as an Easter tribute to Terry Pratchett, BBC Radio 4 is rebroadcasting the Dirk Maggs adaptation of GOOD OMENS. It goes out at at 11:30 every night (hour-long conclusion on Saturday at 2:30 pm), and will be available immediately after broadcast on the internet (and will stay up for a month). You can listen to it anywhere in the world on a computer, or use an app to listen on a phone or tablet.
