Based on the wildly polarizing and regularly divisive reactions that followed his contributions to Doctor Who, the later episodes of Sherlock, and Netflix’s Dracula miniseries in general, fans aren’t 100% in agreement that Mark Gatiss knows how to be consistently successful when it comes to putting a fresh spin on an iconic character.
With that in mind, it’s understandable if some people scoff at the mere notion of the actor, writer, producer, comedian, and novelist outlining his desire to take a crack at James Bond. Cinema’s most famous secret agent has typically been a distinctly British enterprise on both sides of the camera, but 007 is still the star of a blockbuster Hollywood franchise at the end of the day.
Striking that balance has always been key to the enduring popularity of the brand, with No Time to Die‘s Cary Joji Fukunaga the first American to call action on a Bond adventure, which marked the character’s 25th big screen outing.
During a recent appearance on the Distraction Pieces podcast, Gatiss was asked which property he wanted to work on the most, and he was quick to offer an answer that everybody would have been expecting.
“It’s obviously James Bond. It may look like it but I’m not set on remaking everything from my childhood, it’s just the way it’s fallen. The truth is it’s very hard to get things commissioned and inevitably if something has an existing ‘intellectual property’ it makes people sit up. It’s really a battle between trying to get things off the ground which are less familiar and sometimes people going: ‘Well would you like to have a go at this?'”
You never know, he may end up getting the call when he’s got a proven track record for updating long-running IPs for the modern age, with Amazon and MGM partnering up for the first time to slap Bond with a coat of fresh paint now that the Daniel Craig era has drawn to a close.