Neil Patrick Harris’ ‘Doctor Who’ character has an unexpected ‘Batman’ connection

It is a noble tradition in British theatrical circles that goes back generations: Any actor born within the domain of the Royal Family must appear on Doctor Who. It’s like how everyone in Sweden has to serve in the military for a minute, or how every member of Gen Z has to spend a summer married to Dane Cook. It’s been this way for so long, you might be surprised by the number of performers who’ve shown up on the series over the course of 60 years. Turn on a random classic episode, wait a few minutes, and suddenly there’s John Cleese, or the bad guy from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or David Prowse in a minotaur costume. 

Or, in a few very specific, difficult to prove cases, you might see the late Michael Gough. Gough enjoyed a storied acting career, with 200 IMDb credits to his name at the time of his passing in 2011 at the age of 94. He was best known for his work portraying Alfred Pennyworth, the long-suffering butler of billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne, in the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher quadrilogy of films and their respective Pepsi ads.

When his country called on him to serve, Gough answered readily, appearing as two separate Doctor Who characters. During a Fifth Doctor adventure in 1983, he played Hedin, a member of the Time Lord High Council and laser enthusiast with a requisitely funny hat. Before that, though, Gough achieved the United Kingdom acting community’s second highest honor: Playing a weird alien bad guy who never showed up in the classic era again

In 1966, playing opposite William Hartnell’s First Doctor, Gough made his Doctor Who debut as the villainous Celestial Toymaker – basically the deadly, cosmically powerful version of your nephew who keeps saying that there’s a rule in Battleship that says he’s allowed to peek at your board three times if he’s losing. Depending on what dialect of nerd you speak, he was either a combination of Arcade from X-Men and Mister Mxyzptlk from Superman, or Q from Star Trek if he really loved playing Ants in the Pants.

Gough’s version of the character never returned to the screen during the original run of Doctor Who. Decades later, though, the Celestial Toymaker is set to return in the show’s 60th anniversary three-parter, portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris with what sure looks like the energy usually reserved for background dancers in one of the nightmares that Bob Fosse had when he gave himself nicotine poisoning. Harris should have a relatively blank slate to work with when reinterpreting the character, since three out of four of the original Celestial Toymaker episodes have been lost to time. The whole thing begs the question, “How long until the Doogie Howser kid is playing Alfred in a Batman movie?” Also, “When did we all turn a thousand years old?”