Mark Gatiss: ‘We live in an age of popinjays – Rees-Mogg, Johnson – and we fall for it’

The Sherlock writer and actor on his new adaption of Dracula and why apple crumble is the answer to our doom-laden timesMark Gatiss is running an hour late for our lunch, but I can forgive him. He seems to have so much on. The co-creator and writer of Sherlock (he also played a beady-eyed Mycroft) has not long finished production on a new incarnation of Dracula, a revamp which will be a headline act of BBC schedules next year. That morning he’s been making the finishing edits to voiceovers for a Bram Stoker documentary that will go out alongside the drama series. He has also devised and directed a Christmas ghost story – an adaptation of MR James’s tale, Martin’s Close, which pitches Peter Capaldi into the 17th-century courtroom of “Hanging Judge” Jeffreys. Add in last year’s sell-out tour of the regathered League of Gentlemen, and his long stint as writer on the revived Doctor Who, and you have a sense of Gatiss, at 53, as a sort of one-man Gothic cottage industry, marshalling a production line of brilliantly knowing grotesques, injecting fresh blood into fireside stories.I wait for him with a beer in the Duke of Cambridge, the organic foodie pub that is his local in Islington (it comes as no surprise to discover that his house around the corner features a Victorian laboratory with cabinets of curiosities). It’s a windy old November afternoon starting to lose its light. I half expect Gatiss to swing through the saloon doors in a cape and a gust of autumn leaves. When he arrives, tall and carefully elegant and grinning and apologising, the best he can offer by way of horrors are ghoulish scrolled photos of himself tricked up as Jacob Rees-Mogg for a Halloween party. “I had some ‘dead pallor’ makeup which was perfect,” he says, of his pinstriped Mr Hyde. “The only problem was several people wanted to punch me.” Continue reading…
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