Mark Gatiss on his new version of A Christmas Carol coming to London’s Alexandra Palace

t have to be exhausting to purchase presents for Mark Gatiss, as he’s already acquired “principally all I ever wished”. When he and fellow Bretton Corridor drama college students Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith arrange their edgy comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen with Jeremy Dyson within the early 90s, it was with the intention “to get identified for one thing that will then open doorways to different issues”.

Twenty years of the League certainly led the 55-year-old to a stunningly prolific and numerous profession as an actor, author and latterly a director, together with shut involvements with the TV reboots of his favorite childhood tales: Doctor Who, Sherlock, Dracula. This Christmas, he once more will get to indulge his passions – particularly, the spooky ones – with a trio of recent initiatives.

He’s tailored and performs Jacob Marley in a brand new manufacturing of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol that involves the rediscovered Victorian theatre at Alexandra Palace this month. He’s written, directed and performs the villain in Sky’s adaptation of the beloved 1972 movie The Superb Mr Blunden. And the most recent of his 30-minute TV variations of MR James’s ghost tales, The Mezzotint, starring Rory Kinnear, will display screen on BBC2.

Supernatural tales go well with the festive season because it’s “the flip of the yr, trying backwards in addition to forwards, and a melancholy time for lots of people, stuffed with reminiscences of those that have gone”. And it was Dickens who “crystallised” the connection between Christmas and ghosts.

Gatiss first noticed Ronald Neame’s 1970 movie of the Scrooge story when he was 4 and has liked each iteration since, together with Jack Thorne’s now-perennial Previous Vic staging. “In each interview I’ve ever carried out I’ve been requested about dream elements and at all times stated ‘Jacob Marley’ within the hope somebody would provide it me,” he says. “Finally I needed to do my very own model.”

His adaptation is “correctly spooky but in addition nice enjoyable and joyous” and brings out Dickens’s fury about social injustice. “The story is so acquainted it could usually really feel saccharine, like a High quality Avenue tin, however the beating coronary heart of it is extremely offended,” he says. “We had been rehearsing in Spitalfields and we’d come out on Thursday night and there was an enormous meals financial institution queue around the block. The explanation it retains chiming with individuals is that it’s eternally related.”

The Superb Mr Blunden is a extra cheerful affair, the story of a mysterious previous man who introduces a younger brother and sister to baby spectres from the previous to be able to forestall a criminal offense. Lionel Jeffries directed and starred within the unique movie. “I noticed it at college after I was eight, simply earlier than we broke up for Christmas,” Gatiss remembers. “It’s very bittersweet, shifting, humorous and charming. Initially the thought of remaking it felt like heresy. I learn the ebook [Antonia Barber’s 1969 source novel The Ghosts] once more and, not like the movie, the household are from the trendy day. I assumed that was price exploring.”

This time Simon Callow performs the title function, however Gatiss has introduced again three actors from the 1972 model, together with the pleasant Madeline Smith, and himself performs the villainous Mr Wickens below a number of layers of prosthetics. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it – dressing up?” he grins. “In A Christmas Carol I play just a few different elements, and I’ve made positive I get those the place I can put some tooth in and have a little bit of enjoyable. It’s what I at all times responded to, rising up. The actors I liked rising up, like Alistair Sim, Ronnie Barker or Leonard Rossiter, had been at all times recognisable below the wigs and glue and tooth.”

He tells me with delight that on one other latest challenge, the outer Hebridean inter-war movie The Street Dance, his costume included a toupee previously owned by one other hero, Scottish comedy actor Stanley Baxter. “They gave it to me on the finish of the shoot, and it’s just like the Holy Grail to me,” he says. “It’s my go-to toupee now. It’s at all times helpful to have the ability to say: ‘I’ve my very own…’.”

He can’t inform me if he wears it within the forthcoming Mission Inconceivable 7: the forged are sworn to secrecy. “It’s form of enjoyable but in addition overwhelming, the one factor that’s as massive as Bond, and Tom Cruise is there on a regular basis. He was simply so type and wonderful and useful and enjoyable. However every so often you have a look at him out of the nook of your eye and go “F*CKIN’ ‘ELL IT’S TOM CRUISE!” He’s been a part of our cinemagoing life since we had been youngsters and he appears to be like precisely the identical. It’s like somebody’s walked off a poster.”

Taking pictures the Street Dance, and MI7, he managed to keep away from the second lockdown. Beneath the primary, there was no appearing work for him or his husband, Ian Hallard, and he discovered it inconceivable to put in writing. “I texted Steven Moffat [his collaborator on Doctor Who, Sherlock and Dracula] and stated, ‘who would have thought a world pandemic wasn’t conducive to the muse?’,” he says. “I paint as a passion and that saved my psychological well being, actually.

“However after we get to a spot the place we are able to look again on this era, it is going to result in lots of fascinating work, indirectly about [the pandemic], however in regards to the isolation and detachment, residing by the apocalypse we’ve all had dry runs for by drama. Besides there weren’t Triffids on the streets, there have been anti-vaxxers.”

Gatiss is a considerate interviewee, diplomatic until positive of his opinion or challenged on his work. The League have at all times denied that the black clown make-up of the character Papa Lazarou was in any manner racist, however I’m wondering if the savage caricatures and cross dressing within the present now feels dated or embarrassing. “No, I’m immensely pleased with it,” he says.  “We weren’t making Conserving Up Appearances, to not be pejorative about that. It was at all times very edgy comedy, and typically very bleak and genuinely unusual.”

He’s much less strident about his fellow Physician Who alumnus Russell T Davies’s latest suggestion that homosexual actors ought to play homosexual elements: “It’s a fancy subject. You need to massively enhance the alternatives for homosexual actors, for individuals of color, for girls. However you don’t need to get so reductive that the one one that can play Hamlet is an precise Prince of Denmark.” As a homosexual man himself he’s anxious in regards to the erosion of liberalism in politics and public discourse – “I’m a cockeyed optimist, however I don’t really feel very optimistic in the meanwhile.” And as somebody from a modest background, he fears individuals like him are actually priced out of the humanities and training.

“The thought of Alan Bennett, one other of my heroes, getting a scholarship to Oxford could be a lot tougher now,” he says. “Class is a large barrier: it acquired so significantly better and now it’s a lot worse once more. It’s not simply in regards to the downgrading of arts in training, the destruction of drama golf equipment: it’s about ensuring [working class] individuals can see you are able to do it. It nonetheless occurs to me: somebody I do know fairly nicely requested not too long ago what faculty I went to. There’s a type of assumption that should you’ve carried out okay you have to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. It’s just like the early 80s once more in plenty of methods.”

Gatiss and his older brother grew up in Sedgefield, County Durham, their father a mining engineer who later went to work “at a wonderfully unusual postwar psychological hospital which has turn out to be within the public creativeness one thing like Arkham Asylum”. He used to downplay the establishment’s significance to his life, however now acknowledges that “it was fairly a wierd upbringing, residing reverse this place: we went swimming there, went to the cinema there, had our hair reduce there. It in all probability was an enormous affect on my worldview, my familiarity with psychological well being and likewise a form of northern Gothic.”

Though it was exhausting to return out, first to his mum, then his dad, his was a childhood of “love and stability and enjoyable. I misplaced my dad in Could and that brings an terrible lot of stuff to the floor, nevertheless it’s all great things; fascinating, humorous issues.” As an illustration, he assumed his dad and mom had been terribly liberal in permitting him to observe Hammer and Amicus horrors at an early age: now he realises it was simply that his dad wished to observe them.

He and Hallard met on-line and married in 2008, in Center Temple, below the portrait of Oscar Wilde’s nemesis, Edward Carson QC. They reside in two knocked-together Georgian cottages in North London, about which myths abound. No, he says, he now not has 4 rooms stuffed with DVDs. And no, he doesn’t have a Victorian laboratory both.

“I did construct one in our previous home 15 years in the past, nevertheless it was a life lesson: I constructed the factor I wished most after I was eight, however having carried out it as a grown man, I realised it was a folly and dismantled it. I nonetheless have some fine details. However the factor I need which I’ve by no means had is a Wimshurst Machine – these two celluloid discs that rub collectively and make that Frankenstein crackle of electrical energy.” Effectively, that’s the present downside sorted, then.

A Christmas Carol – a Ghost Story is at Alexandra Palace from November 26 to January 9, alexandrapalace.com. The Superb Mr Blunden premieres on the BFI with a Q&A with Gatiss and stars Tamsin Greig and Simon Callow on November 29, bfi.org.uk, and shall be on Sky and NOW in December. The Mezzotint will air on BBC Two and iPlayer in December