Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: bbc, benedict cumberbatch, Bookish, doctor who, mark gatiss, martin freeman, sherlock, steven moffat

Mark Gatiss on New Series "Bookish," Possible "Sherlock" Feature Film

"Best Actor" Olivier Award-Winner Mark Gatiss (The Motive and the Cue) discussed the new series "Bookish" & the chances of a "Sherlock" film.

Mark Gatiss is a very busy man: he's the writer and star of the upcoming 1940s detective series Bookish and currently playing Sir John Gielgud in The Crown creator Peter Morgan's play The Motive and the Cue in London's West End, where he has won Best Actor at the Olivier Awards. He's known for many projects and accomplishments, including writing and guest-starring on Doctor Who (not to mention writing several Doctor Who novels for the Virgin and BBC Books range and playing The Doctor in fan films back in the 1990s), yet the one thing reporters never stop asking him about is Sherlock, which he co-created and co-wrote with Steven Moffat.

Who or What Is "Bookish" Again?

Bookish is another "genius detective" archetype in the same vein as Sherlock Holmes, of course. It's also Gatiss' first lead role in a television series where he plays a London bookseller in 1946 London who becomes an amateur detective solving crimes for the police through his knowledge of books. As Gatiss explains, his character knows that all human experiences and actions have been done before and written in books. He would consult his books to get the information he needs to explain how a crime is committed and who the killer is to the coppers. He's in a "lavender marriage" where his wife provides him cover at a time when being a gay man was illegal in England, and he gathers a found family of social outsiders around him.

What about Sherlock?

So you could squint and say Gatiss is playing a version of Sherlock in Bookish. When asked about whether there would be more Sherlock, Gatiss, who also played Sherlock's brother Mycroft in the series, said it all depends on the availability of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman to play Holmes and Watson again since they're two of the busiest actors in the business with not only roles in the MCU but all sorts of movies and television series. These days, you can't blink without another movie starring either of them popping up every other week. However, nobody has said Sherlock was over. It was never cancelled. Why would the BBC cancel one of their biggest worldwide hits, one so popular that women in China wrote slashfic for it? Gatiss said they would love to make a Sherlock feature film, but it depends on Cumberbatch and Freeman.

Bookish will premiere on Alibi in the UK.

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