Mark Gatiss

He is best known for his work in television acting in and co-creating shows with Steven Moffat. Gatiss has received several awards including a BAFTA TV Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards.

Mark Gatiss
Gatiss in 2017
Born	(1966-10-17) 17 October 1966 (age 57) Sedgefield, County Durham, England
Alma mater	Bretton Hall College of Education
Occupations	Actor screenwriter television producer comedian novelist director
Years active	1993–present
Spouse	Ian Hallard ​ (m. 2008)​
Mark Gatiss's voice from the BBC programme Desert Island Discs, 23 October 2011.

Gatiss co-created, co-wrote and acted in BBC comedy series The League of Gentlemen (1999–2002). He co-created and portrayed Mycroft Holmes in the BBC series Sherlock (2010–2017) and Frank Renfield in BBC / Netflix miniseries Dracula (2020). He also wrote several episodes of Doctor Who during Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. His other TV roles include Tycho Nestoris in Game of Thrones (2014–2017), Stephen Gardiner in Wolf Hall (2015), and Peter Mandelson in Coalition (2015). He has acted in films such as Victor Frankenstein (2015), Denial (2016), Christopher Robin (2018), The Favourite (2018), The Father (2020), Operation Mincemeat (2021), and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023).

On stage, Gatiss played Menenius in the revival of William Shakespeare's Coriolanus (2013) for which he earned a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role nomination. He took on the role of King George III in a revival of the Alan Bennett play The Madness of George III (2018). He portrayed Sir John Gielgud in the Jack Thorne play The Motive and the Cue (2023) for which he earned the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. His other theatre roles include in The Recruiting Officer (2012), The Vote (2015), and A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story (2021).

Gatiss was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, England, to Winifred Rose (née O'Kane, 1931–2003) and Maurice Gatiss (1931–2021). He grew up opposite the Victorian psychiatric hospital Winterton, and later in Trimdon, before his father, a colliery engineer, took a job as engineer at the School Aycliffe Mental Hospital in Heighington. His family background is working class. His passions included watching Doctor Who and Hammer Horror films on television, reading Sherlock Holmes and H.G. Wells, and collecting fossils. All those interests have influenced his creative work.

One of his early forays into theatre was in Darlington in March 1983, playing Dad, in The Waiting Room by Tony Stowers, a macabre and surreal Pinteresque comedy, which explores a disintegrating family unit. In July of the same year, he would have acted in Stowers' follow-up, A Sense of Insecurity, but was unable to take the role because his father insisted he take his exams instead.

Gatiss attended Heighington Church of England Primary School, and Woodham Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe. At the latter, he was two years ahead of Paul Magrs, who also went on to write Doctor Who fiction. Gatiss then studied Theatre Arts at Bretton Hall College, an arts college affiliated to the University of Leeds.

1999–2005: Career beginnings

 

Gatiss is a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen (along with fellow performers Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson). He first met his co-writers and performers at Bretton Hall, Yorkshire, a drama school which he attended after finishing school and having spent a gap year travelling around Europe. The League of Gentlemen began as a stage act in 1995, which won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1997. In the same year the show transferred to BBC Radio 4 as On the Town with the League of Gentlemen, and later arrived on television on BBC Two in 1999. The television programme has earned Gatiss and his colleagues a British Academy Television Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux. In 2005, the film The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse was released, to generally positive reviews.

Shearsmith and Pemberton reunited in 2009 to create a similarly dark BBC sitcom, Psychoville, which featured an episode guest-starring Gatiss. The three reunited again in 2012 to film a series of sketches for the fourth series of CBBC show Horrible Histories.

Outside The League, Gatiss' television work has included writing for the 2001 revival of Randall & Hopkirk and script editing the popular sketch show Little Britain in 2003, making guest appearances in both. In 2001 he guested in Spaced as a villainous government employee modelled on the character of Agent Smith from The Matrix film series. In the same year he appeared in several editions of the documentary series SF:UK. Other acting appearances include the comedy-drama In the Red (BBC Two, 1998), the macabre sitcom Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2003), Agatha Christie's Marple as Ronald Hawes in "The Murder at the Vicarage", a guest appearance in the Vic & Bob series Catterick in 2004 and the live 2005 remake of the classic science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. A second series of Nighty Night and the new comedy-drama Funland, the latter co-written by his League cohort Jeremy Dyson, both featured Gatiss and aired on BBC Three in the autumn of 2005. He appeared as Johnnie Cradock, alongside Nighty Night star Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock, in Fear of Fanny on BBC Four in October 2006, and featured as Ratty in a new production of The Wind in the Willows shown on BBC One on 1 January 2007. He wrote and starred in the BBC Four docudrama The Worst Journey in the World, based on the memoir by polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

Gatiss appears frequently in BBC Radio productions, including the science fiction comedy Nebulous and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes story The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith. In 2009, he was The Man in Black when BBC Radio 7 revived the character (originally played by Valentine Dyall and Edward de Souza) to introduce a series of five creepy audio dramas. He is also involved with theatre, having penned the play The Teen People in the early 1990s, and appeared in a successful run of the play 'Art' in 2003 at the Whitehall Theatre in London. In film, he has starred in Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004) and had minor roles in Birthday Girl (2001), Bright Young Things (2003), Match Point (2005) and Starter for 10 (2006). The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, a film based on the television series, co-written by and starring Gatiss, was released in June 2005. He also plays the recurring character of Gold in the audio revival of Sapphire and Steel produced by Big Finish Productions. Gatiss also appeared in Edgar Wright's fake trailer for Grindhouse, Don't, a homage to 1970s' Hammer Horrors.

2007–2017: Doctor Who and Sherlock

 

Gatiss has also made three credited appearances in Doctor Who. In 2007, he played Professor Lazarus in "The Lazarus Experiment". In 2011, he returned in the Series 6 episode "The Wedding of River Song" as a character known as Gantok, and in the 2017 Christmas special "Twice Upon A Time" as "The Captain". Also in 2007, he appeared as Robert Louis Stevenson in Jekyll, a BBC One serial by his fellow Doctor Who scriptwriter Steven Moffat. In 2008, he appeared in Clone as Colonel Black. Gatiss also wrote, co-produced and acted in the BBC Four ghost story Crooked House (2008).

He appeared in the stage adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother at the Old Vic in London from 25 August-24 November 2007. He won much critical acclaim for his portrayal of the transgender character Agrado. In the 2008 English language re-release of the cult 2006 Norwegian animated film Free Jimmy, Gatiss voiced the character of "Jakki," a heavy-set, bizarrely dressed biker member of the "Lappish Mafia." In this his voice is used along with the other actors of League of Gentlemen such as Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. The dialogue was written by Simon Pegg and other actors included Pegg himself, Woody Harrelson and David Tennant, who worked with Gatiss on Doctor Who. He was scheduled to perform in Darker Shores by Michael Punter, a ghost story for all the family, at Hampstead Theatre 3 December 2009 – 16 January 2010 but had to withdraw after a serious family illness. Tom Goodman-Hill took over his role.

In 2010, he portrayed Malcolm McLaren in the BBC drama Worried About the Boy which focused on the life and career of Boy George. He adapted H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon into a television film of the same name for the BBC, also playing Professor Cavor. He also made a three-part BBC documentary series entitled A History of Horror, a personal exploration of the history of horror cinema. This was followed on 30 October 2012 with a look at European horror with the documentary Horror Europa. In March 2010, he was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3. From December 2010 to March 2011, Gatiss was playing the role of Bernard in Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings at the Royal National Theatre in London alongside Catherine Tate. In December 2011, he appeared in an episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage in an episode entitled The Science of Christmas, alongside Brian Cox, Robin Ince and Richard Dawkins. In January 2012, he took the role of Brazen in The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar Theatre, London. From 18 October – 24 November that year he was Charles I in the Hampstead Theatre production of 55 Days by Howard Brenton, a play dramatising the military coup that killed a King and forged a Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell.

With Steven Moffat, with whom Gatiss worked on Doctor Who and Jekyll, he also co-created and co-produced Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. He also portrayed Mycroft Holmes in the series. Premiering in 2010, the series is a modernised adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, in which Gatiss plays the role of Sherlock's brother Mycroft. Gatiss has influence on all episodes as producer and he has written four episodes, one for each series: the finale, "The Great Game," for the first series, "The Hounds of Baskerville" for the second, "The Empty Hearse" for the third and "The Six Thatchers" for the fourth. He also co-wrote "Many Happy Returns," a mini-episode released in late December 2013 which acts as a prelude to the third series, with Steven Moffat; the episode "The Sign of Three" with Moffat and Steve Thompson; and "The Abominable Bride", a special episode released in early January 2016, with Moffat. Finally, he co-wrote the final episode of Sherlock, "The Final Problem", with Moffat, released in January 2017.

In December 2013, Gatiss joined the cast of the Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus as Senator of Rome, Menenius. The play went from 6 December 2013 through 13 February 2014. For his performance, Gatiss received a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. On 25 December 2013, a version of the ghost story "The Tractate Middoth" by M. R. James and adapted by Gatiss was broadcast on BBC Two as part of the long-running A Ghost Story for Christmas series. It starred Sacha Dhawan, John Castle, Louise Jameson, Una Stubbs, David Ryall, Eleanor Bron, Nick Burns and Roy Barraclough. It was followed on 25 December 2013 by a screening on BBC2 of a new documentary by Gatiss titled M. R. James: Ghost Writer. The programme saw Gatiss explore the work of James and look at how his work still inspires contemporary horror today.

He appeared in season four of Game of Thrones in 2014 playing Tycho Nestoris and reprised this role in season five and season seven. In the BBC's 2015 series Wolf Hall, Gatiss played King Henry VIII's secretary Stephen Gardiner. He also appeared in Channel 4's Coalition in 2015. In 2016, he played Harold in the groundbreaking American play The Boys in the Band, play at Park Theatre (London) opposite his husband Ian Hallard. They made history when the play transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre in 2017 as the first married gay couple to appear together on a West End stage.

Gatiss appeared as the Prince Regent (later George IV) in the eight-part historical fiction television drama series Taboo (2017) first broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom on 7 January 2017 and in the United States on FX on 10 January 2017. In May 2017, Gatiss began a recurring role on The Secret History Of Hollywood, a series of podcast biopics on Golden Age-era Hollywood. Its 11-part series, Shadows tells the story of Val Lewton's life and career, with Gatiss providing the introductions for each episode.

2018–present: Theatre roles and expansion

 

In November 2018, Gatiss portrayed the lead, King George III in a revival of the Alan Bennet play The Madness of George III at Nottingham Playhouse. The production was broadcast live to cinemas as part of National Theatre Live. Kate Maltby of The Guardian wrote of his performance, "Productions of The Madness of George III live or die by their star, and Gatiss delivers a tour de force. This is a viscerally repulsive depiction of the gap between public and private life." That same year he played a supporting role as John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough in the Yorgos Lanthimos directed black comedy The Favourite (2018) starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz. Also in 2018 he acted in the children's film Christopher Robin starring Ewan McGregor and The Mercy with Colin Firth. In 2020 he acted opposite Anthony Hopkins in the film The Father based off the Florian Zeller play Le Père. In October 2021, Gatiss wrote and played Jacob Marley in a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story by Charles Dickens playing at both Nottingham Playhouse and Alexandra Palace in 2021.

He appeared as a modern-day incarnation/descendant of Count Dracula's servile companion Renfield in the series of his own co-creation, Dracula in the third and final episode, "The Dark Compass". In 2017, Gatiss and Steven Moffat re-teamed to write three episodes for TV miniseries Dracula. The series premiered on BBC One on 1 January 2020, and was broadcast over three consecutive days. The three episodes were then released on Netflix on 4 January 2020. In June 2021, a new adaptation of The Ghosts by Antonia Barber, written and directed by Gatiss for Sky One, was announced. It broadcast on 24 December. In 2021 he acted in the British war film Operation Mincemeat portraying Ivor Montagu. That same year he acted in Locked Down, The Road Dance, and The Sparks Brothers. He joined the Mission Impossible franchise acting in action film Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) starring Tom Cruise.

In May 2022, Gatiss directed The Unfriend, a new play by Steven Moffat at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, starring Amanda Abbington, Frances Barber and Reece Shearsmith. The play transferred to London's West End Criterion Theatre in January 2023. In February 2023, Gatiss directed The Way Old Friends Do a new play by Ian Hallard at the Birmingham Rep. This also transferred to the Criterion in August. In April 2022, Gatiss starred as Lawrence in the seventh series opener of Inside No. 9. In April 2023, Gatiss played as Sir John Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue, a new play written by Jack Thorne and directed by Sam Mendes at London's National Theatre. The story of how Richard Burton (played by Johnny Flynn) and Gielgud clashed as they staged Hamlet on Broadway in 1964, the play has received good reviews, particularly the two leads. Leonie Cooper of Time Out wrote of his performance, "Mark Gatiss launches himself into a condescending but sensitive Gielgud...[who] is just as impressive, his uncanny Gielgud manifesting a man in flux, as a new era of performance threatens to subsume his traditional take on stagecraft. Gatiss’s Gielgud is lonely and lost, but still more than capable of getting one over on the wayward Burton." For his performance Gatiss won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor.

Filming got underway in Belgium in April 2024 on Bookish, which Gatiss co-wrote and stars.

 

At the age of eleven, Gatiss won a school literary competition with a short science fiction story "The Anti-Noise Machine", published in a booklet by Darlington Borough Council. Gatiss had a childhood interest in the BBC science-fiction show Doctor Who and devoted much of his early writing to the series, despite its 1989 cancellation. Gatiss's earliest published work as a professional writer was a sequence of novels in Virgin Publishing's New Adventures series of continuation stories and novels. In these works, he tried to correct the problems which had led to the show's decline in the late 1980s. The first television scripts Gatiss wrote were for a BBV direct-to-video series called "P.R.O.B.E." Gatiss's four scripts each featured a different actor who had played Doctor Who's titular character of the Doctor: Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. The videos have since been released on DVD despite Gatiss once commenting that he would not authorise their re-release, as he regarded them as a learning exercise. His other early contributions to the Doctor Who franchise included four novels, two audio plays for BBV and two audio plays for Big Finish Productions.

Gatiss has written nine episodes for the 2005 revival of the show. His first, "The Unquiet Dead," was the third episode of the revived series in 2005; the second, "The Idiot's Lantern," aired the following year in the second series. Although he acted in the third series and proposed an ultimately unproduced episode for the fourth, involving Nazis and the British Museum, it took until 2010 for Gatiss to return as writer. He wrote "Victory of the Daleks" for that year's fifth series and went on to contribute "Night Terrors" for series 6, "Cold War" and "The Crimson Horror" for series 7 and "Robot of Sherwood" for series 8. He also wrote "Sleep No More" for series 9 and "Empress of Mars" for series 10. He has also contributed to the franchise outside the main show. His early work (see above) was primarily Doctor Who expanded media.

Gatiss wrote and performed in the comedy spoof sketches The Web of Caves, The Kidnappers and The Pitch of Fear for the BBC's "Doctor Who Night" in 1999 with David Walliams. He penned the 2013 docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time, a drama depicting the origins of the series, to celebrate the show's fiftieth anniversary. It ended with a cameo by Gatiss's League of Gentleman castmate Reece Shearsmith, portraying Patrick Troughton, who played the Second Doctor. A "Making Of" feature about this programme, narrated by Gatiss, was made available on the BBC Red Button service, and also posted on the BBC's official YouTube channel. He has written for Doctor Who Magazine, including a column written under the pseudonym "Sam Kisgart," which he was originally credited as in the Doctor Who Unbound audio play Sympathy for the Devil for his role as the Master. "Sam Kisgart" is an anagram of "Mark Gatiss", and is also the name under which he was credited for his cameo in Psychoville.

Novels

Gatiss has written several non-fiction works, including a biography of the film director James Whale and the documentary M.R. James: Ghost Writer, which Gatiss also presented. The documentary followed Gatiss's directorial debut with an adaption of one of James's stories, "The Tractate Middoth", for BBC Two, which was broadcast on Christmas Day 2013. His first non-Doctor Who novel, The Vesuvius Club, was published in 2004, for which he was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer in the 2006 British Book Awards. A follow-up, The Devil in Amber, was released on 6 November 2006. It transports the main character, Lucifer Box, from the Edwardian era in the first book to the roaring Twenties/Thirties. A third and final Lucifer Box novel, Black Butterfly, was published on 3 November 2008 by Simon & Schuster.

Gatiss was featured on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential gay people in the UK in 2010, 2011 and 2014. He entered into a civil partnership with actor Ian Hallard in 2008 in Middle Temple, in the City of London. Gatiss once built a Victorian era laboratory in his north London home, as the fulfilment of a childhood dream. Gatiss is an atheist. The University of Huddersfield awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters in 2003.

Actor

Film

Television

Writer

Director

Books Doctor Who novels

• Nightshade (ISBN 0-426-20376-3)
• St Anthony's Fire (ISBN 0-426-20423-9)
• The Roundheads (ISBN 0-563-40576-7)
• Last of the Gaderene (ISBN 0-563-55587-4; also 2013 reissue ISBN 1-849-90597-5)
• The Crimson Horror (ISBN 978-1-78594-504-5)

Doctor Who anthology contributions

• Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (teleplay "The Unquiet Dead") (ISBN 0-5634-8641-4)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2007 (short story "Cuckoo-Spit") (ISBN 1-84653-001-6)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2009 (short story "Cold") (ISBN 1-846-53067-9)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2010 (short story "Scared Stiff") (ISBN 1-84653-095-4)
• The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2011 (short fiction The Lost Diaries of Winston Spencer Churchill) (ISBN 1-8460-7991-8)
• The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who 2012 (short fiction George's Diary) (ISBN 1-8499-0230-5)

The League of Gentlemen

• A Local Book for Local People (ISBN 1-84115-346-X)
• The League of Gentlemen: Scripts and That (ISBN 0-563-48775-5)
• The League of Gentlemen's Book of Precious Things (ISBN 1-853-75621-0)

Lucifer Box novels

• The Vesuvius Club (ISBN 0-7432-5706-5)
• The Devil in Amber (ISBN 0-7432-5709-X)
• Black Butterfly (ISBN 0-7432-57111)

Miscellaneous non-fiction

• James Whale: A Biography (ISBN 0-3043-2863-4)
• They Came From Outer Space!: Alien Encounters in the Movies (with David Miller) (ISBN 978-1901018004)

Miscellaneous fiction

• The King's Men (as "Christian Fall") (ISBN 0-3523-3207-7).
• The EsseX Files: To Basildon and Beyond (with Jeremy Dyson) (ISBN 1-8570-2747-7).

Audio plays

• 2000 AD (Judge Dredd audio) Death Trap

Doctor Who (and related)

• Time Travellers: Republica
• Time Travellers: Island of Lost Souls
• Phantasmagoria
• Invaders from Mars