'American Gods' Showrunner on Creating an Entirely Original Character for the Neil Gaiman Adaptation
Showrunner Bryan Fuller has revealed in an interview with EW details on an original character created for the Starz adaptation of Neil Gaiman's seminal fantasy novel American Gods. Corbin Bernsen plays Vulcan, an old god in the mythology of the story, but one that didn't exist prior to the series.
Gaiman was initially set to pen the script for the episode that introduced Vulcan, which would have been a nice touch for fans of the source material, though scheduling conflicts prohibited him from being able to in the end. Co-showrunner Michael Green gave some details on the character.
"He’s a brand-new addition who came from an experience Neil had. He was going through a small town in Alabama where he saw a statue of Vulcan. It was a steel town and, as he told the story, there was a factory that had a series of accidents where people were killed on the job and they kept happening because an actuarial had done the numbers and realized that it was cheaper to pay out the damages to the families of people who lost people, rather than to shut down the factory long enough to repair, and that occurred to him as modern a definition of sacrifice as there might be."
Fuller added that "we started talking about America’s obsession with guns and gun control and, really, if you’re holding a gun in your hand, it’s a mini volcano, and perhaps, through this character, there’s a conversation to be had."
The series arrives in April 2017, and tells of an impending war between the old gods and the new ones, who represent modern fascinations with television, drugs, the internet, etc."
Source: Collider
