For Big Finish listeners, Joe Sims is Mark Seven, the android created originally for Terry Nation’s various Dalek spin-offs who’s now the partner of Jane Slavin’s Anya Kingdom. Mark Seven is one of the central three characters of the Dalek Universe series starring David Tennant, although he was first heard in an episode of River Song with Alex Kingston, and The Dalek Protocol, starring Tom Baker. Shortly before the second set of Dalek Universe was released, Sims chatted with Paul Simpson…

 

How did you get caught up with Big Finish in the first place?

I was in the BBC Radio Drama Company for a year. I got to work with lots of amazing audio actors and obviously there were ceremonies where Big Finish was always on the radar and I was exposed to them for the very first time. I was so desperate to work with them because they created these wonderful worlds that everyone was talking about – and when you listened you were like, ‘Oh OK, I can see what the fuss is about.’.

Then my friend Tracey put my name forward for a small role in something and very luckily I was able to get it and then never looked back. I feel like the nice thing about the Big Finish team or family is that they have very little time for wallies, morons, whatever. The fans feel the same way.

The people that run the company are fans of Doctor Who themselves and they have no time for those kinds of pretentious actors that unfortunately you have to rub shoulders with from time to time. So from the minute you walk in you feel completely welcome, you feel completely at home and it’s just amazing.

What an incredible experience to sit with Tom Baker for days on end and have him recount these incredible stories. He is the epitome of the raconteur. He’s just got stories to burn and it doesn’t matter if sometimes you hear the same story over and over again – he’ll put a different spin on it. You could just hear the same story over and over ad infinitum and always be interested. It’s mesmeric and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be!

You know what? It doesn’t even matter whether they’re true or not. Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? They’re just so brilliant, so just crack on, long may he reign.

Were you a Doctor Who fan before you got involved with this? You’d have been growing up in the 80s when it was less popular and then disappeared from view for a time.

That’s exactly right, I was in that corridor of uncertainty unfortunately because of when I was getting into it. Sylvester McCoy was my Doctor. The Psychic Circus just had me cowering behind the sofa but every now and again I’d pop my head back up to have a little look because I loved Ace. Sophie Aldred I just fell in love with, that excitement of seeing someone so beautiful coursing through your veins. I’m sure I’m not alone in that feeling. So yes, I was bitten by the bug from then really but there’s that hiatus.

I remember when I found out that Doctor Who was coming back, I was doing a show up in Manchester and two of my friends were huge Whovians and were in the cast. They were really excited and they were like ‘It’s coming back! It’s coming back!’

Big Finish is made by fans for fans. We’re talking about people who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world in which all of our characters inhabit so you feel like you’re in extraordinarily safe hands. The beautiful thing about working in the audio medium is that you’re bound only by the imagination of your audience and it’s something very different. What you’ll get from Dalek Universe will be something very different to what your friends and colleagues will get. Everyone will get something very bespoke to them because it draws upon the amalgam of all your experiences and all your understanding of Doctor Who. Those worlds for me just feel so rich and so detailed because they’re written by people who truly know.

From an actor’s point of view as well you have to be humble enough to go, ‘I don’t know anywhere near as much about this world as the people who are writing it, as the people who are going to be listening to it.’ So I want to draw from that rich well of experience and ask all my questions and run the risk of sounding a bit silly in order to play a character who’s hopefully, a lot more genuine, a lot more heartfelt and a lot more detailed. I can add to this wonderful world that everybody’s created.

When you were cast as Mark, was that just for the original Dalek Protocol story with Tom?

Yes, it was summer 2018. Obviously how could we have known what would have befallen us? As far as I was concerned it was something that was going to be done in isolation.

Big Finish cocoon you in this wonderful environment where you can be as big and as strong and as brave as you want to. It can always be taken back, it can be tempered and remember, as a team we’ve got the writer in the room.

When you’ve got people in a room ready to talk to you and [director] Ken [Bentley]’s and [producer] David [Richardson]’s there in the room, everybody’s working collaboratively. Then you go to the green room and you’re able to talk about what you just did and that informs your choices in something else. It feels like a really safe place to work and when it’s safe you can be at your bravest, because you can swing big. If it’s a swing and a miss, as it often is, then we can go back and re-record because there’s an expert there who’ll just go ‘Right, I didn’t know that Mark would necessarily  do it like that’ and explain the reasons why and then we can rerun the fun.

The thing about it is if you’re brave like that you can fail gloriously.

Oh yes.

Did you do any background research on Mark Seven?

Yes of course and the beautiful thing about the Whovians that inhabit this wonderful world is there is always so much that you’re able to draw from. Obviously talking to John Dorney, Nick Briggs and David Richardson, all those people, then you’re able to continue that journey.

The thing is, there is a danger that you can be overloaded with information. It can bog you down and you’re not feeling spontaneous enough but I feel you need to be able to understand a character in order to discard aspects of it.

I feel like I owe Doctor Who fans especially to do extensive research, to build a solid foundation for a character, because your audience will smell BS a mile away. If you’re trying to lie to somebody and you’re trying to pull the wool over someone’s eyes then there’s nothing like a Whovian audience to be able to call you on it and justifiably so. When you ask me if I like Doctor Who? I love Doctor Who but am I as much of a fan as so many people out there? Absolutely not.

I just feel like I’m not going to try and hoodwink anybody. I’m going to ask those questions and I want to be treated like a novice almost because then I’m able to be as honest as I possibly can and then try and present Mark Seven as best as I know how.

Fans may forget you are bringing your acting training, you’re bringing your acting experience to it as much, if not more than any Doctor Who knowledge because otherwise, as you say, the BS is there and you end up trying to be someone else’s vision of Mark Seven rather than yours.

And then it become dishonest, I think

I had so much fun with Mark Seven especially when I’m working with Tom, working with Alex [Kingston], working with David [Tennant] but most importantly, working with Jane [Slavin]. It’s been beautiful to see that relationship drawn out and the more you work at that, the more it throws up. That’s testament to Jane being just fantastic and all the incredible writers able to create that world and create that relationship because it just felt so, so genuine, so honest and so beautiful. I’m just looking forward to everybody hearing how that develops.

Are you reaching a point where you look at something and go ‘Would I really say that?’ Have you reached that confidence about Mark?

I feel like all those things are always a conversation. It doesn’t matter whether I’m playing Mark Seven or any of the other characters I’ve been lucky enough to play in my career, I feel like if you’ve got a hunch then trust it. It provokes a conversation. That doesn’t mean that my hunch is necessarily correct but it could be. We’re all fallible human beings and actually the conversation might lead to something that I didn’t anticipate or John didn’t anticipate or Ken didn’t anticipate

It goes back to what we were saying before: be brave enough to ask those questions. Foster an environment in the rehearsal room or on set to be able to be creatively brave to ask those questions, to not feel foolish to ask those questions because those questions very often might unearth something really special that no one anticipated.

So yes I definitely feel brave asking the questions because I feel an obligation to the audience to ask those questions.

You’re playing a hero here…

Yes.

And you’ve said that is a nice change for you. How does it feel to play the good guy?

It’s an amazing feeling, I’m 6ft 3inch with a shaven head so normally on telly I am either a professional red herring or I’m the perpetrator of some pretty awful crimes. I do a lot of night shoots carrying a shovel, let’s put it that way (laughs).

Have you seen the artwork? The artwork is just incredible and that, for me, is proper bucket list stuff. I’ve gone and got so much of it professionally printed and framed and so is adorning my house, egocentric maniac I am. My girlfriend probably would have liked a few pictures of her knocking about there somewhere (laughs) But it’s amazing when the artwork’s that good.

The idea of being the hero of the Dalek Wars is just amazing and as a fan or as a little boy or as a man, I’m 41, that never ever leaves you. You want to be the hero, you want to be the hero of your own story, so the idea that you get to do this, it just feels scandalous that you get paid for doing something so brilliant. They say that if you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. and it feels like that.

I’ve got friends that tell me when I go on podcasts or interviews that I sound like a competition winner and maybe I should pull that back but I don’t care now. Life’s too short to worry about imagine or any of that kind of stuff. I feel that lucky. What luck to be able to do something like this. What luck for someone to trust me enough with a character like Mark Seven that I can just run with it. I feel like the luckiest person in the world and I’m unapologetic if that’s the way it sounds.

What’s the biggest challenge that you face playing him?

I suppose, for me, because you can’t see me, you can’t see what I’m doing, so much of it is in the voice. Say Jane, myself and David or Jane, myself and Tom are running, I’m not tired. Mark Seven could run 100 miles and not break a sweat whereas the other guys are so it feels like the burden of responsibility lies with them to be able to create that scene.

So how do you show that you’re stressed when you’ve almost got a binary way of thinking? He’s extraordinarily cool under gunfire whereas ordinarily every other character I’ve ever played, you’ll be able to hear in his voice that he’s panicked, he’s tired, he’s frustrated and all of that, whereas actually everything’s a lot more measured. Again, testament to the fantastic performances of Jane and David and Tom and everyone I’ve been lucky enough to work with, because they have to create that urgency in a way that Mark doesn’t. It’s lovely to hear someone so cool and calm under pressure and stuff like that. But it’s strange, the range that Mark Seven has and the journey that Mark Seven has isn’t ordinarily where it would be where you’re under attack.

It’s an emotional journey for Mark. It’s that positronic brain he’s got that is almost getting… I don’t know, is it files corrupted or something like that? But it bleeds in. The more time he spends with Anya, the more time he spends with the Doctor, the more you can see those humanistic traits come out of him.

The conflict of what he’s been programmed to feel and the way that he’s starting to feel is just beautiful and that’s the build with Mark and that has some profound effects on his behaviour both for good and ill.

Are you trusting your own judgment as to how much to allow those elements to come though?

Well, as we’ve already discussed, it’s a team effort really, so if you go too far off grid or you move in a direction that doesn’t serve the story then you’ll be brought back and again if you don’t do that, that brings about a conversation.

So I trust in the process, I trust in the family and I trust in the fact that there are people there that know so much more about that world than myself, so collaboratively we can build something brilliant. And something that’s authentic, something that’s real.

Like I say, the writing in this is so good, it’s very easy to play those notes because in the wrong hands it could be clunky or heavy handed. If the writing’s not good enough then it just sounds inauthentic and if it sound inauthentic then everyone will smell that a mile away. I feel like it’s very gentle and nuanced, and hopefully I’m playing those notes too.

There is a feel sometimes that things can go comic book and you lose that moment. the minute you go over the top…you’ve lost something and it’s almost impossible to drag it back.

I think you’re absolutely right. If people are buying what you’re selling, if you’ve created these authentic characters, you’ve done the research and it feels like real people or real characters are embroiled in this story, then you can set it anywhere. You can be on any planet, any world, facing any foe and you absolutely buy into that and that’s key to the story.

What else are you up to at the moment other than Mark?

At the moment I am writing, There’s an amazing story in Bristol: there’s a patch of land out the front of the zoo and this man claimed that he worked for the zoo when he spoke to the council, and when he spoke to the zoo, vice versa. He did it for 25 years then vanished as a millionaire off the face of the Earth. We’re telling that story in a Breaking Bad meets Only Fools and Horses kind of way!

That’s a labour of love for me. I want to write something that is quintessentially Bristolian and comedic as well. I’ve never written before, so I’m working with two wonderful writers and it’s with a great production company and that seems to be moving ahead so it looks like that will be the next thing that I’ll be doing.

Click here to order the Dalek Universe stories from Big Finish

and here for our reviews.

Thanks to Steve Berry and Caitlin Plimmer at Big Finish for their assistance in arranging this interview.