DAVID TENNANT

It’s hot-air balloons, trains and camels for the Doctor Who star, 50, as he climbs aboard one of the most famous road-trip tales ever told. Tennant stars in Masterpiece’s update of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (Jan. 2 on PBS) as Phileas Fogg, a British gentleman who bets a fortune that he can circumnavigate the globe in only 80 days, unheard of considering the year is 1872.

How does your Fogg differ from previous incarnations?

The Phileas Fogg in the book is rather inscrutable, quiet, ponderous, even aloof. He doesn’t portray anxiety at any stage of his round-the-world trip.

But our Fogg is filled with anxiety and selfdoubt. He’s not a man that believes he can do this at any stage, so he’s very different.

Was the adventure modernized?

It wouldn’t work to modernize it because you’d make it around the world in a day and a half. So it had to be of its time, and the world was a different place. Our script doesn’t shy from the truths of that, but it

find some storytelling potential. We can look at it from a modern perspective and wonder, Has society moved on or backward?

How excited were you to get the role of the Doctor on TV’s Doctor Who?

As a child, I was obsessed. It definitely captured my imagination. I had posters on my wall and I queued up to meet Tom Baker, who played the role, on a book signing tour. It was being excited by that storytelling that made me want to become an actor.

Do you make New Year’s resolutions?

Absolutely not, because you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. If there’s something you need to change in your life, I’m not sure that the arbitrary change of date is the impetus. If it is, then probably you don’t have the wherewithal to manage it. But perhaps that’s a little Scottish Presbyterian of me.