Unless we’re counting vanity projects like Moonwalker and Captain EO, Michael Jackson only acted in two movies in his entire life. He was Scarecrow in The Wiz in 1978, and he had a quick cameo in 2002’s Men In Black II.
Every once in a while, we’ll hear that Jackson tried to play Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace or that he pitched himself as the next James Bond. Now, with the long-gestating Netflix adaptation of the Neil Gaiman comic
By 1996, I was being taken to Warners, where the then-president of Warner Bros. sat me down and told me that Michael Jackson had phoned him the day before and asked him if he could star as Morpheus in The Sandman.
So there was a lot of interest in this, and they knew that it was one of the Crown Jewels, and what did I think? And I was like, ‘Ooh.'”
Given that Morpheus is an unearthly being, it’s actually not that hard to imagine Michael Jackson in the role.