Mark Bonnar is perhaps best known to SFB readers for playing The Eleven in Big Finish’s Doctor Who range but over the past few years he has also stepped into Martin Landau’s role as John Koenig in the company’s reimagining of the 1970s Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series Space: 1999. With the latest set out at the end of May, Bonnar had a quick chat with Paul Simpson…

 

How did you get caught up with Space: 1999 at Big Finish? Obviously you’ve got a relationship with various people there but how did this particular one come up?

It might have been David [Richardson] who asked me if I could do an American accent and I went ‘yeah.’ He said, ‘OK, OK that’s it.’ And that was all he said. Then a few weeks, maybe months later – so obviously they’ve been in development for quite a while – I got a call from my voiceover agent asking me to do a tape for them, for Space: 1999, at which point my inner ten year old jumped for joy.

So I read a scene, and weeks and weeks went by, much to my chagrin. The next time I was doing a [story featuring the] Eleven with Sylvester McCoy and somebody, I can’t remember if it was Nick, said, ‘Oh, you’ll be getting a call soon from somebody about Space: 1999.’ And I went ‘I’m presuming that’s good news, then?’

So yes, I auditioned for it, is the long and short… but obviously they know me fairly well, over the years. It was an absolute immense joy, still is.

You said your inner ten year old jumped for joy. I presume from that you remember watching it as a kid?

Oh of course.

What do you remember? Just the basic idea or did you remember details?

Inner seven year old, probably to be honest. It was 1975, wasn’t it? I was born in  ’68.

I remembered a fair bit of it. Not as much as I thought when I went back to watch some because obviously, I was seven. But, Dragon’s Domain [which features in the new set] was one that gave me one of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had, as a child and stuck with me for years, very very vivid. People have said on Twitter, when I tweeted a silly picture of myself with my little toy spacecraft, ‘Oh, Dragon’s Domain, that was the one that always really terrified me.’ And I think that really captured people’s imagination.

Obviously we’re doing this in 2023 not 1975, so are there things that you think you could do with Koenig now, that just would have been beyond the Andersons and producer Fred Freiberger back in those days?

I think the audio medium allows you to do anything you want, that’s the beauty of it and especially for the medium of science fiction. As long as the scripts are good, which they always are, you paint the picture with the words, and with what the character’s going through and with the wonderful soundscape that Big Finish always produce you can find yourself wholly transported. I think in some ways, it’s the best medium for it.

Space: 1999: Dragon’s Domain is out now from Big Finish