Jodie feared playing ‘intelligent’ Doctor

JODIE WHITTAKER says playing one of the most intelligent characters on television was what she feared the most – after agreeing to take over from Peter Capaldi on Doctor Who.

“One of the things that made me nervous about playing the Doctor was having to play one of the most intelligent characters on TV. I’ve always considered myself emotionally bright, just not necessarily academic. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand things at school, I did – I just couldn’t take them in using the traditional teaching methods.

“There are 30 kids in most classes and if you are in the back end of that, it’s hard to keep up,” the 36-year-old tells Radio Times.

Although she didn’t necessarily find school straightforward while growing up in the West Yorkshire village of Skelmanthorpe, her creativity allowed her to make the best of it: “I’ve always learnt to enjoy life through make-believe. As a kid I could sit and play and be in a world I imagined. It turned into my way of learning. I’d struggle with things that didn’t capture that for me. But if I could apply my imagination to those subjects, it worked. So I gave a division sign a character and the numbers on either side a bit of a story. If I made it move or talk it made sense and I could do it.”

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