One of the best things about Prime Video’s Good Omens is the crazy good casting. It’s hard to imagine anyone else other than David Tennant playing the Bentley-driving demon Crowley, or Michael Sheen as angelic bookseller Aziraphale. But before the ineffable Tennant-Sheen duo won our hearts, creator Neil Gaiman had some very different casting ideas in mind.
First, he fancied Michael Sheen as Crowley rather than Aziraphale, an idea that sounds ludicrous now. Sheen would later go on to channel his more evil side by voicing Lucifer in Audible’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. While responding to a fan on Tumblr, Gaiman suggested that Sheen’s version of Crowley “would have been a lot more sinister” than the version we got. But Sheen went on to play Aziraphale, and the rest is history.
So if Gaiman originally wanted Sheen to play Crowley, who did he see as Aziraphale? “I remember spending a lot of time pondering who Aziraphale could be back when Crowley was going to be Michael, and I think Hugh Grant was a leading contender in my head,” Gaiman revealed. “But then somewhere in the middle of writing episode 3 Crowley became David Tennant and Michael Sheen became Aziraphale and once that had been decided it couldn’t have been anyone else.”
Good Omens graphic novel artist stopped watching the show
Once you’ve seen Michael Sheen and David Tennant as Aziraphale and Crowley, there’s no turning back. One person who knows this better than anyone else is Colleen Doran, the artist behind a new graphic novel adaptation of the original Good Omens book, which came out in 1990. Gaiman cowrote that book with the late Terry Pratchett.
This project started life on Kickstarter, where it became the fastest comic book adaptation ever to be funded; it currently has collected over $2.4 million from over 36,000 backers. Clearly, the fandom is excited. As for Doran, she’s trying her best to turn her attention away from the show to focus solely on the source material. This is proving a hard task.
“There is absolutely no way I can do anything with the graphic novel versions that competes with the amazing David Tennant and Michael Sheen,” Doran told CBR. “I’m not even trying.”
But when I knew I was getting this project, I immediately stopped watching the show to make sure I cleared as much of it from my head as possible and stuck to only what was written on the page. It was a task, let me say because I’d watched that show dozens of times. When I was feeling down, I just played it on a loop.
