ON SET WITH... Pearl Mackie

30, landed her Theatre actress Pearl, she was cast first major TV role when

Bill in as the Doctor’s new assistant us behind Doctor Who. Here she takes which is shot the scenes on the show, in Cardiff and at Roath Lock Studios on location in south Wales...

2

MONDAY

I’m as wide- eyed and excited to be a part of Doctor Who as Bill is to be teaming up with the Doctor for some intergalactic adventures, which makes acting the role so much easier. Peter Capaldi, who plays the Doctor, helps too. I have to be honest and admit that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing for the first few weeks of filming and Peter was there to guide me through. We have rehearsal time today and he’s being very patient as we talk about forthcoming scenes.

3 TUESDAY

The Doctor Who team as a whole has been fantastically supportive and Matt Lucas, who plays Nardole, has become a good friend. He’s so funny, both on screen and when the cameras aren’t rolling. He brings a lovely, positive energy to proceedings and we hit it off straight away. We both really like musicals and musical theatre so we spend a lot of time singing tunes at each other over the course of a day’s filming, which definitely helps the time pass between scenes.

4 WEDNESDAY

The Doctor and I have plenty of fight scenes with the show’s monsters, which I absolutely love. That’s him with an Ice Warrior (right). The monsters are scary on screen, but not so much the people who play them. Today they’re sitting in the make-up room still in their jogging bottoms!

5 THURSDAY

The biggest challenge about joining a show everybody’s so familiar with is making sure your performance matches everyone else’s. What goes through my mind before every scene I shoot is, ‘Am I getting this right?’ We all know Doctor Who is science fiction, but it also has to be realistic within the confines of those fantastical situations. It’s also about pacing myself – staying as focused for the last scene of the day as I did for the first. We film for 12 hours every day and it’s quite tough. I hadn’t done much camera work before and it all takes some getting used to.

6 FRIDAY

We’re now almost ten months into shooting this series and it still feels like a kind of mad rollercoaster ride. It’s hard to pick out a highlight – there have been so many – but today’s scene with Peter, where my character Bill is asking the Doctor about something that’s upset her, will live long in my memory. Peter’s simply brilliant and the scene is emotional and challenging. Then there are more action scenes to finish the day. I think yesterday I walked or ran about 3km which is not unusual during the course of a day’s work here – usually I’m racing away from monsters!