Johnny Depp Almost Took David Tennant’s Crowley Role in Good Omens

There are certain actors who just take to a role like a duck to water, and David Tennant has done that more than most. Whether it is his stellar turn as Doctor Who, which proved so popular that the show has struggled to match it since his departure, the darker and harder hitting detective role in Broadchurch, or more recently his deliciously wicked take on the demon Crowley in the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett series Good Omens, Tennant just seems to be able to bring his talent to many guises when asked. So it is no surprise that Tennant was always first choice when it came to his Good Omens role, which he will be reprising in the second season of the comic fantasy that is currently filming for a late 2022 release. However, while Tennant was always the man for the job in Neil Gaiman’s eyes, the studio at one point wanted to put Johnny Depp in the role.

Answering a question from a fan on Tumblr, Neil Gaiman was asked which part took the longest to cast in the series. In his response, the Sandman creator said, “David Tennant. I told Amazon I wanted him to play Crowley early in 2017. They did not see it. They thought he was too much like [Aziraphale actor] Michael Sheen, they wanted a movie star, particularly Johnny Depp. I didn’t.”

Gaiman went on, “The process of not-casting David went on for months. Finally David was one day away from agreeing to make someone else’s movie, and I phoned Amazon and told them that if they didn’t agree to cast David we didn’t have a show as I didn’t have another choice, and they had to trust me. And they sighed and said ‘Well, if you’re that passionate about casting David, okay.'”

It is fair to say that, as is usual in these cases, the studio were wrong and the creator was right, as the popularity of David Tennant and his co-star Michael Sheen’s on screen partnership is what ultimately made the series work even better. In fact, the pair’s brilliant chemistry trickled over into another project starring the two friends, when they produced Staged, a sitcom filmed and based during the Covid pandemic, which played on how many interactions were carried out via internet meetings, which sometimes became a little bizarre and frayed. As well as being hilarious and entertaining in its own right, Staged also gave everyone who had taken part in a Zoom call over the last two years a new appreciation for the communication method.

Gaiman was quick to quip about the superiority of his choice in his post, commenting, “Later, the people at Amazon admitted that I might have had a point. These days they are very happy that I stuck to my guns and that they were willing to humour me.”

According to the Amazon Prime Video blurb, “The new season will explore storylines that go beyond the original source material to illuminate the uncanny friendship between Aziraphale, a fussy angel and rare book dealer, and the fast-living demon Crowley.” Although the death of Terry Pratchett did mean that we were deprived of a possible sequel in novel form, Gaiman stated around the time of the first season of Good Omens being released that they had often discussed where such a novel would have gone if they had ever made it around to writing it. So at least we are getting to see exactly where that could have gone in some form. The first season of Good Omens is currently available on Amazon Prime Video. This news comes to us from Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr.

Topics: Good Omens

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