If you’re a fan of Doctor Who or Sherlock, chances are you’ve seen Mark Gatiss in the past. This master of many trades is an actor, director, writer and producer. He first became a familiar face to audiences after co-creating the League of Gentlemen stage act, which then transferred to TV and radio. His film credits include Birthday Girl, Bright Young Things and Match Point.
Doctor Who
The Doctor is an eccentric, compassionate extraterrestrial Time Lord who zips through time and space in his TARDIS – an old and occasionally unreliable police box-shaped spaceship that can change its appearance to fit its surroundings. The show follows the adventures of this alien, as well as his or her companions, as they try to combat injustice and help people in trouble.
The show has featured a number of different actors as the Doctor, including David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston. Gatiss has also written and starred in several episodes of the series. He has also directed an adaptation of M.R. James’s short ghost story Crooked House for BBC Two, and presented the documentary M.R. James: Ghost Writer.
He has appeared in many other TV films and series, including Clone (2008), Crooked House (2008), Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen (2009), Midsomer Murders (2010), Sherlock (2010-2017) and Being Human (2012). He also played Tycho Nestoris in Game of Thrones from 2015 to 2017.
Gatiss has appeared on stage as well, notably in Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings in 2009. He has written a number of radio dramas and written and performed a stage version of the play The Teen People in the early 1990s. He has also acted in and written for theater productions of a number of Steven Moffat’s plays, including The Unfriend and the musical The Crypt.
Sherlock
A quirky spin on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth, this m4u free movies film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes, with Michael Gambon as his partner Watson. The duo is sent out on a mystery of “unnatural” origins by a wealthy client, and soon find themselves caught up in an international conspiracy with links to drug trafficking, espionage, spiritualism, and a famous magician.
Gatiss has also written episodes of the Doctor Who expanded media series, including The Web of Caves, The Kidnappers and The Pitch of Fear. He has acted in the BBC comedy sketch show The League of Gentlemen, alongside fellow members Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. He has also performed on stage, with roles in Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother and the revival of The Madness of George III at Nottingham Playhouse.
In addition to writing and acting on Sherlock, Gatiss has been a regular guest star on many TV shows, including ‘Clone’ (2008), ‘Crooked House’ (2008), ‘Psychoville’ (2009), ‘Midsomer Murders’ (2010), ‘Being Human’ (2012), and ‘Game of Thrones’ (2014). He has also made appearances in films like ‘The Favorite’ (2018), ‘Locked Down’ (2021) and ‘Dad’s Army’ (2020). He voiced the character Jackie in a 2008 English language re-release of the Norwegian animated film Free Jimmy. The film also starred Woody Harrelson, Simon Pegg and others. Gatiss has also adapted a trilogy of novels called The Vesuvius Club for the Big Finish Productions audio books.
Dracula
In his directorial debut, Gatiss takes a stab at adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The miniseries features a terrific performance from Gary Oldman as the vampire Count himself, and the interactions between him and the peppery Agatha Van Helsing are some of the show’s highlights. But the production itself is marred by overwrought groan-inducing wordplay and a jittering camera that saps the atmosphere of any sense of dread. It also has a tendency to go over the top in its attempts at eroticism; it’s hard to take seriously a scene where Keanu’s hammy Dracula drips blood from his lips like milk and then sucks the nipples of a sleeping Jonathan Harker.
There are some fantastic visual moments (a fly crawling across, then behind an eyeball, a fingernail peeling off, and the mangled remains of a body shoved into a box all make for some truly gruesome images) but they’re ruined by the rattling soundtrack and a frantic directing style that’s more concerned with showing off than creating tension.
It’s a shame that the film falls so flat in so many areas because it has some real strengths, including the work of Bela Lugosi as Dracula; he delivers one of the most enduring performances of his career. But the rest of the cast is largely uninspiring, especially Helen Chandler as Mina Seward and David Manners as Harker; their roles are so underwritten that they never generate any interest.
Mission: Impossible 7
Considering the overwhelming quantity of action movies on the market, it would be easy to assume that the minds behind the Mission: Impossible franchise had long run out of new ways to thrill audiences. But, with the seventh installment — Dead Reckoning Part One — Paramount’s latest entry into this decades-old American series proves that it still has plenty of tricks left in its bag.
In the film, Tom Cruise stars as Ethan Hunt in a story about tracking down an artificial intelligence that has become a threat to humanity. It’s a world-threatening mission that Hunt and his IMF team must accept, if they can figure out how to get the job done. And, if they do, it will probably involve a lot of running, jumping, shooting, and blowing things up.
The film’s opening meeting at the CIA is particularly memorable, with Henry Czerny’s bone-dry Director Kittridge disarming us with shrewd self-awareness. “IMF?” he asks, to which the stone-faced officials respond with confusion. “The Impossible Missions Force?”
As a writer and actor, Gatiss has been busy on the TV scene with his work on Doctor Who and Sherlock. He also wrote for and starred in the popular comedy spoof show The League of Gentlemen alongside Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, and Jeremy Dyson. Besides, Gatiss has appeared in several other television shows, including Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), Barbara, and Spaced.
