The ninth doctor is back! Big Finish has announced the surprising return of Christopher Eccleston, who will reprise his role in a 12-part audio series titled The Ninth Doctor Adventures.
“After 15 years, it will be exciting to revisit the world of the Ninth Doctor, bringing back a character I love to play,” the actor said in the press release.
While the announcement did not reveal any story lines or other cast details for the series, they did shed some light on how Ecclestons’ return to the franchise came to be. Apparently, the talks began at the Gallifrey One convention in February, where Big Finish chairman Jason Haigh-Ellery said he first approached the actor about the resurrection of the role.
“Christopher said he enjoyed meeting the fans and was glad his Doctor was so fondly remembered,” Haigh-Ellery said in the press release.
The production company has yet to discover the full line-up of writers, but it appears as often WSO employee Nicholas Briggs, who is now the creative director of Big Finish, will be one of them.
‘Working with Chris was a very special time for me. The beginning of mine Doctor Who TV career, ”Briggs said in the press release. ‘That, writing for and directing feels incredibly exciting to him. He is such a powerful performer and it will be great to work with him again. ”
Eccleston is famous for its Doctor Who revival after playing the ninth incarnation of Doctor for just one season. While his reason for leaving for a while remained a secret, the actor revealed during an acting masterclass in 2011, according to Bad Wilf, mei The guard, that he left “because of politics” and about a disagreement with the show’s culture and “the way things are run.”
In the years since, Eccleston has been open about the circumstances surrounding his short but beloved tenure on the show.
‘What happened around Doctor Who almost ruined my career,’ the actor said The guard in 2018. “I gave them a hit show and I went with dignity and then they put me on a blacklist. I bore my own insecurities because it was something I had never done before and then I was abandoned, devastated in the tabloid press and blacklisted. I was told by my agent at the time: ‘The BBC regime is against you. You will have to leave the country and wait for regime change. ‘”
The Big Finish series is the actor’s first return Doctor Who, but he came pretty close in 2013, during the show’s 50th anniversary. During New York Comic-Con 2019, he said that originally the special would have seen the return of himself, David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, and Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. However, he “personally did not think the story was strong enough”, and eventually agreed that the new version, which replaced him with John Hurt’s War Doctor, was better.
In the same panel, he also talked about his favorite episodes to shoot and his characterization for the role, revealing that the Doctor’s role taught him the most about being an actor.
‘When someone asks me to kiss their ass, I bite it, that’s what I learned about myself,’ he said at the time, adding, ‘it’s the thing, if you lose your confidence, if you get it back once you know you’ll never lose it again. ”
