Neil Gaiman on religious controversy, Bohemian Rhapsody and his open marriage

Neil Gaiman has been upsetting Christians. The award-winning author of The Sandman, Coraline and American Gods caused a stir earlier this year with the release of the TV adaptation of Good Omens, his well-loved 1990 novel which he co-wrote with the late Terry Pratchett.

It’s about the birth of the Antichrist and the end of the world, a prospect which so appals an angel (Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennant) who have been enjoying life on Earth since the Creation that they join forces to try to thwart Armageddon.

That special relationship went down so badly in the US that a 20,000-strong petition was sent to Netflix to cancel the series – and the streaming giant agreed not to make any more episodes.

But this was less about bowing to pressure than that the series was a co-production between their rivals Amazon and the BBC (on which its six parts are about to air).

“The fact that they didn’t know what channel we were on might indicate that 20,000 people had not watched Good Omens,” says Gaiman drily, through floppy curls, with litmus eyes that test for wit. One complaint was that God, or at least the voice of God, is a woman (played by Frances McDormand).

“It was right up there with their complaints that Adam and Eve were black. You want to say, ‘OK, so are you actually telling me that God has a literal penis? Or that God has a Y chromosome? Because I think you may be having problems with Biblical interpretation here’.”

Certainly, Good Omens’ interpretation of Christian eschatology is playful rather than blasphemous.

“I don’t think we do any more prodding or pushing than theologians over the years,” Gaiman says. Would he be prepared to poke fun at other religions, such as Scientology or Islam.“Or Judaism?” he says.

Gaiman grew up in the Jewish faith until his parents adopted Scientology when he was around five (Gaiman is not a Scientologist, although, according to some reports, his sisters and first wife, Mary McGrath, still are).

“[I would be prepared to poke fun] with any,” he says. “I don’t think there are any ideas that are out of bounds to play with, although mostly I think what people respond to is how intelligently and respectfully you treat them.”

That extends to rock gods Queen, whose hits pop up at important moments in the plot when Tennant’s Crowley is around. It was a standing joke between Gaiman and Pratchett that “everybody we knew had a cassette of Queen’s Greatest Hits in their car that they could never remember buying,” he laughs.

“I didn’t expect [Queen] to say yes [we could use the songs].” Brian May had turned him down once before for a radio adaptation.

“This time, he sent us a lovely email saying, ‘Well, I was a bit up me own a--- then, wasn’t I? We’ll make it happen’.”

Luckily, they got the songs they wanted at a time when it was feared that the much-criticised but hugely successful Bohemian Rhapsody might tank at the box office. Does he think the biopic of the band was a faithful retelling? “Oh, I thought it was fictional,” he says. “I mean, I loved it … but probably what actually happened would have been too confusing.”

Gaiman himself is as near to a rock star as you’ll find in the book world, and since 2011, has been married to one, singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, with whom he has a son, Ash, who’s four. (Gaiman also has three grown-up children with McGrath).

He and Palmer famously have an open marriage. Would he recommend it to other people?

“It works for us,” he begins, then, “It worked for us. She was coming out of a long term-monogamous relationship, which had not really worked for her. And I had come out of a 20-year marriage, and a long period when I was sort of on my own, without really knowing what I was doing.”

Now, he adds, “it’s more notional, because one of us is at home looking after a four-year-old. Amanda is no longer doing the kind of rock ’n’ roll tours where I wave goodbye to her, and see her again in nine weeks. Now, she finishes a Saturday night gig and turns up exhausted at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon [Palmer has a close relationship with her fans, and quite often sleeps on their sofas after a show] and I’m looking after her while she’s home for 48 hours, making her cups of tea. It’s absolutely an open relationship,” he insists, “except that in practice, it’s just like anybody else’s rather dull marriage.”

It’s Gaiman’s turn to be home, and it’s a very different experience, he says, from filming Good Omens, for which he wrote the screenplay and was an executive producer, a role which entailed getting up at 5am and getting in at midnight (“if we were lucky”). He would sometimes find himself on the phone at 3am, too, discussing the latest developments in US channel Starz’s adaptation of his 2001 novel American Gods.

Gaiman’s sprawling DC comic book series The Sandman is being made into a series by Netflix (no petitions to Amazon, please) while a National Theatre production of his children’s book The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens in December.

He’s involved with the former, providing “quality control, co-writing the pilot episode, setting the tone”. With the latter, he has been giving notes. “Ninety-five per cent of the time, I say, ‘That’s marvellous’ and five per cent of the time I say, ‘That doesn’t work’.” He has also finished a children’s book called Pirate Stew, which is being illustrated and will come out next September.

As a writer who made his name in comics, I want to ask him about Martin Scorsese’s recent comments that Marvel films are not proper cinema. (“It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being”).

“Well, they obviously are, because they’re these big things that get shown in cinemas, and people go and love them, and they’re made by craftsmen,” says Gaiman. “They’re cinema in the same way that Star Wars films are.” And there is also “the weirdness of things like Joker,” he adds.

“On the one hand, it’s DC Universe, on the other, it’s an ambitious attempt at a thematic sequel to [Scorsese’s] The King of Comedy. I’m not saying it’s a successful attempt, but you can see there is an ambition there to take it and Taxi Driver and see if we can put them in a superhero movie. Scorsese,” he adds, “frankly made his career taking genre films – gangster films – and making art out of that.”

So, will there be a Good Omens 2? “Terry and I had plotted more,” he says, slightly equivocally.

“I would need to figure out how, and who would do it, because I know that if I want to stay married, I’m not going to do what I did before; disappear off for six-day weeks, and on the seventh, work on Good Omens as well.”

Good Omens is available on DVD and Blu-ray now

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