Television
Doctor Who?! As the first female to play television’s most famous doctor, Jodie Whittaker had a particular wardrobe wish list.
Russell Brown
Having pockets is handy for humans, says Jodie Whittaker, “but as an alien it’s even handier”. Whittaker is – as the whole internet has been reminding her for the past year – the first woman to play the lead in Doctor Who (TVNZ OnDemand, Monday and TVNZ 2, Friday, 7.30pm) and that meant sitting down with costume designer Ray Colman to work out what the Doctor wears.
“It was really collaborative, the entire process – I’ve never had that much input,” says Whittaker. “We’re old friends from doing Broadchurch together, which was wonderful because we didn’t have to learn each other’s rhythms, we could just go straight into bouncing ideas off each other.”
The key inspiration was a photograph brought in by Whittaker showing “a woman with short trousers, boots, braces and a T-shirt. Because it was black and white, I couldn’t even tell what period of history it was from. And I loved this image as being practical and comfortable, but also timeless. The most important thing for me was can you move in it and is it comfortable? There’s a lot of movement, and it needs to be not in any way wearing you – you need to be wearing it.”
There also needed to be one thing so often missing from women’s wardrobes: proper pockets. Where else would one put one’s sonic screwdriver?
Whittaker is frank that she’s a “new Whovian” rather than a lifelong devotee, but notes that Chris Chibnall, another Broadchurch veteran who has replaced Steven Moffat as showrunner and head writer, is steeped in its canon.
“He’s been watching it his entire life, he’s worked on it previously and he knows the show inside out. I didn’t feel very well versed going into it, but Chris said, ‘All you need to
do is come in and audition like you would any other job.’”
Chibnall also had her audition in her the Yorkshire accent of her birth, which duly became the Doctor’s accent:
“It never felt wrong and it never didn’t work. That was brilliant – I was very lucky.”
As for playing the Doctor as a woman, “No one who’s played the Doctor has thought, ‘How do I play this as a man?’ The character, being an alien, is the character. It’s just there in the script.”
Heading off any complaints about availability, TVNZ is streaming Doctor Who on Monday mornings on its website (tvnz.co.nz) shortly after it screens in the UK, and then screening it on old-fashioned television on Friday.