25 Fun Facts About the New ‘American Gods’ TV Series

On Monday, April 17, 2017, the cast and writers of Starz’s American Gods, adapted from the 2001 novel by Neil Gaiman, met with press to talk about the new television series, the original source material and their roles in bringing Gaiman’s gods to life onscreen. Here is my behind-the-scenes fact guide to American Gods, featuring sneak-peeks, surprises and more from the cast and writers behind the series. Gaiman was inspired to write American Gods by his own outsider experience in America. “The main inspiration I suppose was in 1992; August 1992 I moved from England to America and I was a young writer; I’d been visiting America and writing about America … for at least the previous five years and I’d grown up watching American television and American movies so I thought I knew all about America, and then I moved out to rural Wisconsin and discovered incredibly quickly that I knew absolutely nothing about America, that the place I was in was so much weirder than anything I possibly had imagined,” Gaiman said. “That really was the starting point—feeling like a stranger in a strange land.”

… But the idea didn’t fully hit him until a trip he made to Iceland. “I was in Reykjavik in Iceland, summer of 1999, I was looking at the tabletop diorama of the voyages of Leif Erickson going from Iceland to Greenland and then into Newfoundland and then going back, and I thought, ‘I wonder if they brought their gods with them,’ and then I thought, ‘I wonder if they left their gods behind when …