Despite a rocky history with the Doctor Who franchise, including a falsely attributed press release bearing his name, Christopher Eccleston will play the famed Time Lord once again. Big Finish Productions, in association with BBC Studios, announced on Sunday that Eccleston will lend his voice to a reboot audio series, Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Adventures, set for release next year.

“After 15 years it will be exciting to revisit the Ninth Doctor’s world, bringing back to life a character I love playing,” Eccleston said in a statement.

That Eccleston would return to the franchise is in itself a surprise. The actor, who drew initial notices from U.S. audiences for his turn in Danny Boyle’s 1994 thriller Shallow Grave opposite Ewan McGregor, was cast as the Ninth Doctor in the 2005 reboot of the beloved BBC series. But he only starred on the show for one season, and his exit was announced shortly after the series premiere via a press release that the BBC later admitted included statements attributed to Eccleston that were falsified. In a 2010 interview with Radio Times, Eccleston admitted on-set strife was the cause of his exit. “I was open-minded, but I decided after my experience on the first series that I didn’t want to do any more," he said. “I didn’t enjoy the environment and the culture that we, the cast and crew, had to work in.”

Years later, Eccleston, who also starred as the villain in Thor: The Dark World, claimed that leaving Doctor Who left him “blacklisted” by the BBC.

“What happened around Doctor Who almost destroyed my career,” he told The Guardian in March 2018. “I gave them a hit show and I left with dignity and then they put me on a blacklist. I was carrying my own insecurities as it was something I had never done before and then I was abandoned, vilified in the tabloid press and blacklisted. I was told by my agent at the time: ‘The BBC regime is against you. You’re going to have to get out of the country and wait for regime change.’ So I went away to America and I kept on working because that’s what my parents instilled in me. My dad always said to me: ‘I don’t care what you do–sweeping the floor or whatever you’re doing – just do the best job you can.’ I know it’s cliched and northern and all that bollocks, but it applies.”

In an interview with Radio Times around that same time period, Eccleston also claimed his relationship with showrunner Russell T. Davies, among others, had “irreparably” broken down during the first season.

During New York Comic Con one year later, Eccleston said that while he loved playing the Ninth Doctor, “I felt I was going to play the Doctor my way and I wasn’t going to get involved with those politics and that wasn’t workable, so off I went. I became the invisible man.”

Despite his affection for the character, Eccleston declined to return for the show’s 50th anniversary special, which reunited past Doctors including Matt Smith and David Tennant.

“When I read it, I felt that it was basically myself, Matt and Dave riffing off the fact that we used to be the Doctors,” Eccleston said at New York Comic Con in 2019, io9 reported. “I personally didn’t feel like the narrative was strong enough, particularly for the Ninth Doctor because I’d taken quite a lot of abuse in my own country when I left. … As the show was being celebrated I was being abused in the press and that was hard to take and very confusing. So I looked at it and I thought is this really the way I want to come back and I decided it wasn’t.”

The audio series starring Eccleston is set to launch in May 2021 and will be released across four box sets. The full cast and storyline will be revealed at a later date.

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