In October 2020, while filming their Cowboy Bebop role in New Zealand, Mason sent an impulsive, 4 a.m. tweet to The Sandman author Neil Gaiman, as Playbill reports. Neil had just tweeted that he had received footage from the first day of shooting of Netflix’s Sandman adaptation.

“Will Desire be making an appearance in [Season 1]?” Mason wrote in their tweet, replying to Neil’s post. “And if so, please tell me you haven’t found them yet/and are still auditioning.” (For good measure, they included a GIF of Sarah Paulson, in character as Marcia Clark, saying, “I am begging you from my soul.”)

The outreach worked: Neil replied to Mason, Mason got an audition, and they landed the part after getting back to Los Angeles. In an interview with Asbury Park Press, Mason explained while the character matters so much to them: “I feel like there are very specific nonbinary or gender non-conforming characters in media that people latch onto because the representation is so limited,” they said. “And so Desire was, for me, the first time that I had ever seen a nonbinary character in a comic.”