Interestingly, part way through this project the cast list for the upcoming Good Omens TV series, co-produced by BBC and Amazon, has been revealed. I was hoping the casting wouldn’t be revealed whilst I was doing this project, as I didn’t want the ‘official’ image of Aziraphale to influence my own interpretation. However, after seeing the casting, the actor (Michael Sheen, left) playing Aziraphale is already pretty close to how I imagined him looking - long-ish curly hair, a friendly face and a somewhat camp personality. I’m very happy with the casting of both of the characters. The casting also gives clarity to the physical age of the characters, something which is never addressed in the book. As Neil Gaiman has had quite a heavy imput into the casting, it helps to illustrate what the characters look like in one half of the writing teams’ minds.
There was some backlash amongst fans due to the casting not fitting some people’s ideas of the characters; especially Aziraphale who some people imagined as being not white due to the lack of physical description. Gaiman wrote the following on his Tumblr on the subject:
The people in your head and your drawings are still there, and still real and still true. I’ve seen drawings of hundreds of different Aziraphales over the years, all with different faces and body-shapes, different hair and skin, and would never have thought to tell anyone who drew or loved them that that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like. (And a couple of years after we wrote it, I was amused to realise that the Aziraphale in my head looked nothing like the Aziraphale in Terry’s head.) I’ve loved every instance of Good Omens Cosplay I’ve seen, and in no case did I ever think anyone was doing it wrong: they were all Aziraphales and Crowleys, and it was always a delight.
Good Omens has been unillustrated for 27 years, which means that each of you gets to make up your own look for the characters, your own backstories, your own ideas about how they will behave.