Mark Gatiss

Mark Gatiss
Birth date:	17 October 1966
Work in the DWU
Main roles:	Unbound Master, Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart
Main jobs:	Writer, Actor
Stories:	See Credits Section
Main time period active:	1992-present
Career highlights
Notable non-DWU work:	The League of Gentlemen, QI, The Quatermass Experiment, The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, Starter for 10, The Wind in the Willows, Crooked House, Sherlock, A History of Horror, The First Men in the Moon, Cleaning Up, Game of Thrones, The Tractate Middoth, Wolf Hall, The Vote, Who Do You Think You Are?, Dad's Army, Gunpowder, The Madness of George III, The Dead Room, The Box of Delights
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Work for which Mark Gatiss is known
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Mark Gatiss, (born 17 October 1966) credited on three occasions as Sam Kisgart and once as Rondo Haxton, has been a major creative force in the production of Doctor Who fiction since the 1990s. Given his accomplishments as a Doctor Who author, screenwriter, audio writer, audio actor, screen actor, documentary narrator, and documentary subject, his contribution to the Doctor Who franchise is unique.

For Doctor Who, Gatiss writes it so the Doctor usually cannot gain a complete victory or someone else has to step in to save the day. For the former, Victory of the Daleks has the Daleks escape to rebuild their race, but the Doctor save the Earth from a bomb. With the latter, it tends to fall to the companions or a one-off character.

Televised Doctor Who

In terms of televised Doctor Who, as of 2024, Gatiss has contributed nine scripts and made five guest appearances since the series' revival, and been a narrator and a subject of Doctor Who Confidential.

Gatiss holds the distinction of being the very first credited contract writer of the revived series - the story The Unquiet Dead was the first broadcast not to be written by showrunner and Executive Producer Russell T Davies (who wrote the debut episodes Rose and The End of the World). Gatiss would remain the only credited writer other than Davies for the first five weeks of the show - almost half of the first series.

Although other writers had enjoyed small roles in the 1963 version of Doctor Who, he was the first to have not just one, but two large speaking roles — Professor Richard Lazarus, the titular villain of The Lazarus Experiment, and "the Captain" in Twice Upon a Time. During Steven Moffat's time as showrunner, Gatiss was the only writer other than Moffat himself to write a script for every season.

The Richard Lazarus prosthetic was later used in Voyage of the Damned to stand in for the actor playing Max Capricorn in some long shots. (PCOM: Voyage of the Damned)

He later returned to make two brief, uncredited appearances during the Matt Smith era as a Spitfire Pilot in Victory of the Daleks and A Good Man Goes to War. He then made a credited return to the programme as Gantok in The Wedding of River Song.

In series 5's Victory of the Daleks, Gatiss became one of few people to have written and acted in the same episode of Doctor Who, and he claimed that it also made him "the first and only person so far to write for the series and be in it twice".

With his role in this episode, Gatiss also achieved something of another Doctor Who record. By June 2012, he had acted with nine of the eleven actors to have played the Doctor, though not always when that actor was playing the Doctor. Matt Smith was the sixth different Doctor he had encountered in a piece of performed Doctor Who. Later, in 2017's Twice Upon a Time, Gatiss further appeared alongside the then-outgoing Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi, as well as David Bradley, who was playing the same role as the late William Hartnell's First Doctor.

Series 8's Robot of Sherwood, gave Gatiss the opportunity to write for his ninth Doctor, across all media. This equalled the nine Doctors written for by Terrance Dicks and, as of 2024, Steven Moffat. Both Gatiss and Dicks are behind Paul Cornell, however, who has written for 12 Doctors, as of 2024, if one counts the Shalka Doctor.

Doctor Who work in other media

Outside the programme proper, he has written various officially licensed novels, televised spoofs and audio plays, and has sometimes lent his voice to Big Finish Productions. Counting BBC-made spoofs and these audios, he is alone with Sir Derek Jacobi in having played both the Doctor and the Master.

Gatiss also wrote the docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time. A dramatised account of William Hartnell's tenure as the Doctor, it was produced and broadcast as part of the show's 50th anniversary celebrations. He portrayed the Third Doctor in the accompanying Another Doctor extra.

Work with Doctor Who personnel outside of the programme

Gatiss also has significant relationships with Doctor Who luminaries that extend beyond the programme itself. For instance, he is a frequent collaborator with Steven Moffat, with whom he created and produced Sherlock, a TV series which started airing in 2010. He also played Robert Louis Stevenson in Moffat's Jekyll.

He has had some form of professional or semi-professional contact with every actor to have played the Doctor except William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. David Tennant is his most common acting partner amongst people who've played the Doctor. They've been on screen together on several occasions — most prominently in The Quatermass Experiment and the episode "Drop Dead" of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), which also featured Jessica Hynes. He's also been alongside Tennant in Bright Young Things, which also co-starred Fenella Woolgar, Stephen Fry, Bill Paterson, Richard E Grant, and Jim Broadbent; and the English-language cast of the Norwegian animated adventure Free Jimmy, with Simon Pegg, Jim Broadbent and Steve Pemberton. He and Tom Baker have occasionally crossed paths, through their mutual connection to Matt Lucas. Gatiss script edited several episodes of Little Britain, on which Baker was the regular narrator, and fellow Doctor Who Confidential narrator, Anthony Head, played a leading role. Later, he and Baker both appeared as actors in Lucas' The Wind in the Willows. Christopher Eccleston once appeared on an episode of Gatiss' show, The League of Gentlemen. He and Peter Davison were in several BBV productions at the start of Gatiss' career, but following that, they have acted together in the Big Finish Productions audio stories The Sirens of Time and Phantasmagoria. By virtue of his participation in The Zero Imperative, he's acted on-screen alongside Caroline John, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Louise Jameson, and Sophie Aldred.

Credits

Series	Production relevance	Role	Adventure
Televised Doctor Who	Writer		The Unquiet Dead
			The Idiot's Lantern
	Actor	Richard Lazarus	The Lazarus Experiment
	Writer, actor	"Danny Boy" (uncredited)	Victory of the Daleks
	Actor		A Good Man Goes to War
	Writer		Night Terrors
	Actor	Gantok (credited as Rondo Haxton)	The Wedding of River Song
	Writer		Cold War
			The Crimson Horror
			Robot of Sherwood
			Sleep No More
			Empress of Mars
	Actor	The Captain	Twice Upon a Time
Big Finish's Monthly Adventures		Walther Schwieger	The Sirens of Time
	Writer, actor	Jasper Jeake	Phantasmagoria
	Actor	Karl Hendryk / Roboman	The Mutant Phase
		Announcer	Storm Warning
		Thinnes	Sword of Orion
		Vincenzo	The Stones of Venice
	Writer, director, actor	Radio Announcer	Invaders from Mars
Doctor Who Unbound	Actor	Unbound Master (occasionally credited as Sam Kisgart)	Sympathy for the Devil
The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield			The Library in the Body
			The Emporium at the End
			The True Saviour of the Universe
The War Master			Shockwave
			He Who Wins
Masterful			Exclusive scene
			Masterful
Dalek Universe		George Sheldrake	Buying Time
			The Wrong Woman
Minisodes	Writer, actor	Mr. Borusa	The Pitch of Fear
		The Doctor	The Web of Caves
		Mark	The Kidnappers
		Terry Scanlon	Global Conspiracy?
BBV P.R.O.B.E. series		William Bruffin	The Zero Imperative
		Georgie	The Devil of Winterborne
		Alfred Emerson	Unnatural Selection
	Writer		Ghosts of Winterborne
BBV The Time Travellers series			Republica
	Writer, actor	Kell	Island of Lost Souls
Target novelisations	Narrator		Doctor Who and the Planet of the Daleks
			Twice Upon a Time
	Author		The Crimson Horror
Virgin New Adventures			Nightshade
			St Anthony's Fire
BBC Past Doctor Adventures			The Roundheads
			Last of the Gaderene
Doctor Who Confidential	Documentary subject	Himself	Various episodes
	Narrator		Series 2
Doctor Who Storybook	Writer		Cuckoo-Spit
			Cold
The Brilliant Book 2012			My Special Book
Adventures in Lockdown			Fellow Traveller
Doctor Who Greatest Moments	Documentary subject	Himself	The Enemies, The Doctor
BBC DVD documentaries			Putting the Shock into Earthshock, Waking the Dead
Other related works	Writer, executive producer, actor	Jon Pertwee (scenes cut)	An Adventure in Space and Time
	Writer, actor	Third Doctor	Regeneration[5]

Personal life

Gatiss is openly gay and is married to Ian Hallard.

External links

• Mark Gatiss at the Internet Movie Database
• Official Twitter account