Neil Gaiman honoured his late friend Terry Pratchett at the premiere of ‘Good Omens’ by sitting next to a chair on which his trademark hat and scarf were placed.
Neil, 58, turned the pair’s 1990 novel into a TV series for Amazon Prime Video on the request of his co-writer Terry who sadly died in March 2015 at the age of 66, never getting to see their story make it to the screen.
At the show’s premiere at the Odeon Luxe Cinema in London’s Leicester Square on Monday (28.05.19), Neil took the opportunity to remember his friend and honour his final wish.
Speaking on stage before the screening of Episodes 1 and 2, he said: "Terry always used to say to me, ‘You know the big difference between us, Neil, is you believe that one day there’ll be a ‘Good Omens’ movie. I will only believe it, whatever happens, if I’m sitting next to you at the premiere with a big bag of popcorn – and I don’t promise I’ll believe it then.’
"And I like to think, if he were here, right now, he might believe, as we made it for him. So just so everybody knows, right here, right at the front, is Terry Pratchett’s hat, and an enormous bag of popcorn."
Neil and Terry had long wanted to bring their comedy story about the impending apocalypse at the hands of the Antichrist to the screen but couldn’t find a screenwriter willing to adapt their book.
The ‘American Gods’ writer eventually took it upon himself to turn his tome into a script after receiving a letter in 2014 from his great friend Terry – who had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2007 – asking him to do it so he could watch the finished series before the "lights went out".
Speaking on the special green grass carpet at the event – which he attended with his wife Amanda Palmer – Neil told BANG Showbiz: "What we really wanted was to find somebody to adapt it but me and Terry couldn’t find anybody, everybody basically turned us down – some really good people too. They said it was too weird, or too complicated. Then in the summer of 2014 Terry wrote me a letter, he had never asked anything of me before, and said, ‘You have to do this. I know how busy you are but you’ll have to do it so I can see it before the lights go out.’ I said, ‘OK.’ And then Terry died, which astonished me because I thought we had six or seven years of friendship left. I got back home from his funeral and started writing the first episode when I got back to America.
"It didn’t feel funny and I missed him a lot but knowing I was making it for Terry was what kept me going no matter how difficult it got and no matter how strained, it was the knowledge that he was who I was doing it for. I think he’d like it, I wish he was here to see it."
‘Good Omens’ stars Michael Sheen as Aziraphale and David Tennant as Crowley, an angel and a demon who set out on a mission to locate the misplaced 11-year-old Antichrist in a bid to stop the apocalypse and retain their lives on Earth to which they have become accustomed.
The series – which launches exclusively on Amazon Prime Video on Friday (31.05.19) – also stars Jon Hamm, Miranda Richardson, Adria Arjona, Jack Whitehall, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Frances McDormand and Nick Offerman.
Neil Gaiman honours late friend Terry Pratchett at Good Omens premiere
