“Just flagging,” says Mark Bonnar’s publicist, a couple of days before Weekend’s scheduled audience with the Bafta-winning actor, “that other than confirming he’s in it, Mark can’t really talk about The Traitors.”
Well this is awkward. Because it’s the 56-year-old Scot’s forthcoming appearance in the TV phenomenon’s hotly-anticipated celebrity spin-off that, in theory at least, we have convened to talk about. But such is the veil of cloak-and-dagger secrecy that surrounds the show, he’s also under strict instruction not to give anything away.
So what can he tell us? “I can tell you I’m in The Celebrity Traitors,” he says, helpfully.
It’s a start, I suppose. But as a man who’s made a good career playing other people – memorable roles range from a bent copper in Line of Duty to an award-winning turn as Eric Morecambe – what made him sign up to appear as himself in a game show?
“It took me a long time to say yes, because it’s not really the kind of thing I do,” he admits. “But it’s one of the few things we watch as a family, and love. And I’m not getting any younger… I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I thought it would be an interesting left-turn. After which I’ll come back again and carry on doing what I was doing.” (In other words, don’t expect him to move straight on to Strictly.)
Why does he think the show – essentially a very elaborate, brilliantly produced version of wink-murder – has proved such a runaway success with viewers? “I think we love seeing people react to stress,” he suggests. “To being falsely accused, or correctly accused. People like subterfuge – they’re attracted to the darker side of humanity, of which this is a kind of playful version.”
Filming at Ardross Castle, a baronial pile in the Scottish Highlands, during the spring, Bonnar was surprised how “isolating” the experience was at times. “When you’re in your [hotel] room, you’re totally on your own. You have no phone, no communication with the outside world – which is very unusual, in this day and age, when everyone’s connected. That was an interesting experience. But I loved it. I’m quite happy in my own company.
“I spent a lot of time listening to heavy metal music. I took in a little MP3 player with me, with no internet connection – you get searched when you go in, just to make sure you’re adhering to the rules.”
He was also shocked to discover – perhaps naively, he admits, for a man who’s spent so much of his life on film sets – how much of the castle interior is fake. “You lean against the Aga, and it’s wood, and you’re like, ‘oh, I thought it would be real,” he says. “There are about eight or nine locations that you see on telly, and the rest of it is a myriad of backstage corridors.”
Unlike some ‘celebrity’ reality shows, where you’d struggle to pick the contestants out of a police line-up, The Celebrity Traitors boasts a genuinely impressive cast, with Sir Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, Celia Imrie, Clare Balding, Charlotte Church, Nick Mohammed, Jonathan Ross and Tom Daley, among others, contributing to a critical mass of national treasures.
“It’s a vast pool of talent,” agrees Bonnar. “I was quite nervous going in. I knew Nick – we’re sort of pals, he’s such a lovely man – but I didn’t know anybody else, other than by reputation. But, no surprises, they were all lovely. They’re good folk.”
You might think being an actor would offer a natural advantage in a game built around treachery, deceit and bluffing, but Bonnar isn’t so sure. “All the people in that castle are adept at performance of one kind of another,” he says. “You’ve got presenters, sports people, comedians… They’re all used to high-stress situations. So I’m not sure being an actor was of any use. You’ll have to tell me.”
The bookies certainly seem to agree with that assessment: at time of writing, Nick Mohammed is the favourite to win, with Bonnar a 12/1 outsider.
“Who’s lowest on the ranks?” he asks.
Er… well, you are. “That’s interesting,” he says, in that amused-with-a-glint-of-steel manner familiar from many of his on-screen personas.
Let’s move on. Tell me about working with the icon that is Claudia Winkleman. “She’s fantastic,” he says. “She sort of drifts in, does her bit and then disappears into the ether, so you don’t really get to hang out – other than when you’re doing a game in the forest, or something, and she has nowhere to drift off to. But she sent me a lovely text afterwards, and a lovely message for the kids, because they’re besotted with her. She’s a real sweetheart, and thoroughly deserves her reputation.”
Hopefully we’ll see her rocking some spectacular knitwear? “Yes, but she’s got stiff competition from Tom Daley,” he notes, of the former Olympic diving champion and renowned knitting enthusiast. “He’s got his own brand of wool. His jumpers are something to behold.”
“I’m kind of acerbic and cutting in a lot of the things I get cast in. But we can all be like that – grumpy and moody”
Bonnar is talking to Weekend from the “people cave” at the bottom of his Hertfordshire garden. Behind him is a full-size drum kit, and a framed print of Muhammad Ali. “I come here when I need to work out my frustration at not getting a job,” he says. Given that he rarely appears to be off our screens, you’d be forgiven for thinking the kit doesn’t get much use – but he insists he “often” misses out on roles. “That’s true of every actor, no matter who you are.”
Perhaps. But with more than 70 screen credits to his name, he’s not doing too badly, is he? “No, I’m doing okay,” he concedes. “I’ve been very lucky, with the career I’ve had. But you never really lose that insecurity.”
A master of the icy stare, he’s drawn to “dark and unsettling” scripts – like the BBC Scotland thriller Guilt, in which he played a hit-and-run driver, or the recent Netflix hit Dept. Q, about detectives in a Scottish unsolved crimes unit. “It’s what I love to do, and also what I like to watch,” he says. “I’m currently re-watching Breaking Bad, which is funny, but also as dark as it gets in places. And I love David Lynch – he was a master of the unsettling.”
Even his comedy roles, like the rapidly unravelling, chain-vaping Chris in Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s Catastrophe, come with an edge of wiry menace. “I’m kind of acerbic and cutting in a lot of the things I get cast in,” he reflects. “But we can all be like that – we can all be grumpy and moody. As long as there’s something else going on, and it’s not one-dimensional, I’m happy with that.”
It’s certainly not all he does, either: in 2017, Bonnar won the prestigious Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Actor in recognition of four very different roles, ranging from a child abuse survivor in ITV’s Unforgotten (for which he also won a Bafta) to comedy legend Eric Morecambe in the BBC film Eric, Ernie and Me.
He almost turned down the audition for the latter, until his wife, fellow actor Lucy Gaskell, talked him round. “As soon as I got the phone call, I was like, ‘why are they asking me? That’s ridiculous, I can’t play Eric Morecambe’” he recalls. “And Lucy coached me all the way through that. She gently guided me through my self-doubt. Even on the morning of the audition, I woke up and went, ‘I’m not going to go’. And she went, ‘don’t be a fool’.
“That’s one of the good things about being married to each other – you have an insight into, and an understanding of, what the job entails,” he says. “If we’ve ever had to get our kit off, or snog somebody, there’s no awkward conversation when you come home, because you both know how awful it is.”
The couple’s shared experience extends to being former staff nurses on Casualty, albeit not at the same time – they actually met during a tour of The Cherry Orchard. After graduating from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Bonnar spent a solid decade working on the stage, including at the National Theatre and the RSC. But when children Martha and Samuel, now 14 and 10, came along, he made a conscious decision to focus more on screen work.
As we speak, he’s about to join the cast of David Mitchell’s hit BBC comedy-drama Ludwig, where he’ll play a local newspaper editor, and is hoping he’ll get the call for the second series of Dept. Q, which has just been given the green light. “It’s a real joy to be in something Scottish again,” he says, of the ‘tartan noir’ thriller – though, in truth, he’s spent a fair chunk of his career filming north of the border, including three series of Guilt, seven seasons of crime drama Shetland, and now The Celebrity Traitors.
Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish-Slavic family (his grandfather fled Poland at the start of the Second World War), Bonnar had an itinerant childhood thanks to his dad Stan’s job as an environmental artist and sculptor, employed to make various brutalist Scottish new towns look a bit more inviting. His mum Rosi, meanwhile, was a social worker. It feels like a good mix for an aspiring actor, I suggest. “Yeah,” he nods. “There’s that empathy and understanding from my mum’s side, and from dad’s side, a kind of encouragement of the creative. So maybe it was kind of inevitable.”
If it was, it took him a while to realise it: after leaving school at 16, and being turned down for a job as a mortuary technician, he ended up working – somewhat unhappily – in Edinburgh City Council’s planning department, where two of his colleagues happened to be members of a local am-dram group. They encouraged him to come along and have a go, which is how he got his first acting break… as the back end of a pantomime cow. (His friend Mike got the more prestigious gig as the front half. “There is a strict hierarchy in amateur dramatics,” Bonnar told me in 2017. “You work your way up from the bottom. Literally.”)
It was clear, even from that less than auspicious start, that he had a natural talent – though he also harboured ambitions to be a drummer and is, if he does say so himself, no slouch behind the kit. (His brother Vini is a drummer and vocalist with Edinburgh heavy rock outfit Under-Volt).
Like any actor working on British television today, Bonnar has played his fair share of coppers over the years – among the most memorable being Mark Dryden, the corrupt Deputy Chief Constable in Line of Duty‘s second season. A late replacement for Robert Lindsay – who pulled out after two days’ filming, citing “creative differences” – he became an early subject of one of the show’s legendary, single-take interrogation scenes. “I think it was around 17 minutes – 19 pages of script,” he recalls. “That was a very hard, focused day. But it was really well received. It was a stroke of genius from Jed [Mercurio].”
Before we wrap up, I ask if there’s anything else – anything at all – Bonnar can tell us about The Celebrity Traitors. “Just that I’m finding the bookies odds very interesting,” he says, of a matter that’s clearly being bothering him. “Who’s top again?”
I open up a webpage, and we run through the runners and riders. Nick Mohammed is still top, and Mark is joint bottom, with TV historian David Olusoga. Maybe that’s good, I suggest – to be a dark horse. It means people might underestimate him?
“Okay,” he says, not sounding terribly convinced. “Thank you.” And he smiles that famous Mark Bonnar smile, familiar from dozens of TV roles, that I think means he likes me. But could equally mean he wants to kill me.
The Celebrity Traitors is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer
This interview originally appeared in Waitrose Weekend on 2 October, 2025
Interesting Media 