SICKELS JACOB NOTTINGHAM MOVIE

His “absolute favourite” Amicus movie is From Beyond the Grave, with Peter Cushing as a murderous antique shop owner. He won’t say anything about it, except that it had been a long time brewing and it poured out of him over a feverish three weeks. He reels them off: Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, mostly adapted from American comics: “There’s something about the quirkiness of multiple stories rather than one big narrative.” When he found himself stuck in a creative blockade at the height of the pandemic, it was writing a many-stranded horror script that freed him. Photograph: Manuel HarlanĪs a child, he was obsessed with horror films and his favourites were always the multiple-story ones, mostly from Amicus studios – “Hammer’s even lower-rent rival”. Mark Gatiss in rehearsal for A Christmas Carol at Nottingham Playhouse. Plus, I love the idea of this sort of doomed spirit.” One critic said he walked across the room as if both his hips had been shattered, but I was just mesmerised by it. It’s one of those rare instances where they do what Dickens describes, which is to be ‘stirred by an unseen wind’. “He didn’t want to do it, and took it on as a favour, but he’s clearly just having the time of his life. Though most people will remember the film for Albert Finney’s Scrooge, it was Alec Guinness’s “absolutely outrageous” performance as Marley that captivated the young Gatiss. He tracks this particular obsession back to 1970, when, as a four-year-old growing up in a working-class family in the County Durham town of Sedgefield, he first saw Ronald Neame’s musical version of A Christmas Carol. I’ve dropped so many hints over the years, but no one ever took me up on it, so I had to do it myself.”

“I’ve done it twice as a fancy- dress costume. Rather, it’s because, for reasons that reveal his other side as a pop culture geek, a hoarder of great movie moments, he has always wanted to play the role of Jacob Marley, even though the ghost of the old miser’s one-time business partner only makes a brief appearance early on, dragging his chains up from the maw of hell.

SICKELS JACOB NOTTINGHAM SERIES

But it’s not all fear and Victorian clothing, he spent part of the lost year in the Outer Hebrides, playing a country doctor in a first world war romance, The Road Dance, and another part messing about in a pedalo on a boating lake with his old League of Gentlemen muckers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith for a new series of their TV comedy Inside No 9. The latest in a series of half-hour ghost stories, The Mezzotint, is ready to roll into his now customary slot on the Christmas TV schedules. He’s currently putting the finishing touches to his remake of the 1972 children’s film The Amazing Mr Blunden while rehearsing his new adaptation of A Christmas Carol. This is certainly no time to die of hunger for Gatiss, who has rocketed out of the pandemic as one of British showbusiness’s most sought-after all-rounders.

He hadn’t had dinner and was trying to stave off the hunger pangs by sipping water, but not too much, because he couldn’t get out to the loo: “So I’m just really hungry.” He’s like a jovial Eeyore, painting himself into a lugubrious picture of the turnip fields of celebrity, before deciding, with a giggle, that a hearty breakfast of avocado on toast is exactly what’s needed to put everything to rights. “It was a long evening,” he says of No Time to Die. We’re at the hinge moment between the nightlife of an A-lister, who attended the James Bond premiere the previous evening, and the day job as an actor who, by his own account, could only land a role he had wanted all his life by writing the play himself. M ark Gatiss scans the breakfast menu at an east London restaurant with a famished eye.

Sickels jacob nottingham