Mark Gatiss offered a pretty straightforward response when asked why he hasn’t returned to Doctor Who as a writer or actor – or both.
Mark Gatiss is one of the MVPs of modern Doctor Who and much of 21st-century British television. Not only was he one of the key figures and writers from the 1990s Doctor Who fandom, out of which emerged Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat, and David Tennant, but he has also written scripts for the modern revival of the series and also guest-starred in episodes he didn’t write. Of course, Radio Times had to ask him if he was returning to the series anytime soon in an upcoming profile interview. His answer? It’s not really his call.
“No one’s asked me! I had a wonderful run,” he said. “I did nine stories and “An Adventure in Space and Time,” which is a culmination of everything I love about Doctor Who. But the last thing I did… I was in Peter Capaldi’s last story, a regeneration story, with David Bradley, the actor I cast as the First Doctor, and I was playing the Brigadier’s grandfather, and I remember thinking, ‘This is maybe where I should step off because it’s not going to get any better than this.'”
Mark Gatiss: So Much More Than “Doctor Who”
Gatiss played The Doctor in a fan film in the 1990s and wrote several novels for the Virgin books line in the 1990s and the BBC line when the broadcaster took back the publishing license as well as Big Finish audio dramas. He wrote “The Unquiet Dead” in the first series of the 2005 revival of the series that featured Simon Callow as Charles Dickens. He guest-starred for the first time in the third series as an aging billionaire who funds a machine that turns him into a CGI monster. He wrote eight more episodes and, of course, An Adventure in Space and Time. Don’t feel bad for him if he doesn’t come back to Doctor Who. He co-created and co-wrote Sherlock and the recently updated Dracula with Steven Moffat and guest-starred in almost any major genre series you can think of, including Game of Thrones. He also recently brought back the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas as an annual tradition, adapting classic 19th Century stories by the likes of MR James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He’s also contributed to documentaries about horror films, particularly Hammer Horror films, and he is set to lead an upcoming detective series, Bookish, set in the 1940s as a gay bookseller and amateur sleuth at a time when homosexuality was still a crime in England. He’s kind of British Television Drama’s Renaissance man whose work is worth checking out – Doctor Who and beyond.
