10 Things Christopher Eccleston Has Done Since Leaving Doctor Who

2. Heroes

Due to the decent primetime ratings it earnt, Eccleston's 2007 role as the bloke who could turn invisible in Heroes (in the season when it was still good) is also often remembered. But what fans of this series may not know is that he was initially offered the much bigger part of ultra-villain Sylar. Eccleston turned down the chance to play Sylar because he (correctly) thought it was clichéd for British actors to play bad guys in US-made TV programmes and films. In the few episodes that featured his character of Claude Rains, Eccleston was the highlight, successfully aiding much-needed acting weight to the proceedings. Script-wise, there was often the feeling that things were being made up on the fly each week and that there wasn't much of an end-game to look forward to, but at least Eccleston was consistently interesting, albeit sadly underused, along the way. Since Claude Rains survived as a character, perhaps Eccleston will return for the forthcoming Heroes Reborn. He's certainly indicated he'd be up for it, which is not all that surprising since Heroes was one of the highest-profile series he's worked on internationally. One last piece of trivia before moving on: Claude Rains was initially meant to be an alias for the character, referring to the actor who played the Invisible Man in the 1933 film of the same name, but other writers goofed by showing "Claude Rains" as the character's real name on old documents unearthed in a later episode.