Sometimes, it’s good to play the bad guy
Former Doctor Who star found portraying psycho in new film liberating In
David Tennant couldn’t sound less like the character he plays in the movie Bad Samaritan: a chilly, ruthless psychopath who terrorizes a young man who stumbles on a secret. On the phone from Los Angeles, the Scottish actor best known for playing TV’s Doctor
Who is affable and modest, saying several times how lucky he feels for a career that has taken him from an agitprop theatre group as a young drama school grad to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and from a Glasgow antismoking PSA to TV and movie stardom.
But then, that’s the fun of acting, he says, playing characters that are nothing like oneself. “As someone who spent most of their life plagued by guilt and anxiety, there’s something very liberating about being in the skin of someone who has none of those concerns, no remorse, no guilt,” says Tennant, who just turned 47, referring to his upbringing as the son of a Presbyterian minister.
It’s appealing “to indulge those facets of a personality in a way that nobody’s actually getting hurt … Acting is about walking in another’s shoes. That’s why it continues to appeal to me as a way of getting through life. “When you play someone who’s that extreme, who exists in a very extreme corner of human psychology, it’s all the more exciting, all the more challenging, I guess.” Cale, his character in Bad Sa
maritan, is very rich and very bad. He drives a Maserati and lives in an Architectural Digestworthy home in Portland, Ore., whose tasteful interior hides a nasty secret — one discovered by valet Sean (Robert Sheehan), who’s been using his gig at a local restaurant to rob customers while they’re dining.
The rest of the film is a test of wills between the two characters as Sean strives to rescue Cale’s victim and bring Cale to justice, and Cale aims to punish Sean and everyone he cares about, and then eliminate him.
This isn’t Tennant’s first time playing a villain, of course.
He has been the charmingly diabolical Kilgrave in Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Netflix and Barty Crouch Jr., henchman of the evil Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“I’m hugely fortunate that I’ve done a wide variety of things,” Tennant says.
“I’m lucky enough to have been in a lot of different kinds of genres, shows that feel quite distinct from each other.”
It’s a happy accident, he says, not a conscious plan, adding that he’s “bumbled from one thing to another.”
Those things include the lead as a taciturn detective in the well-regarded British drama Broadchurch; a vampire hunter in the 2011 movie Fright Night; Scrooge McDuck in the revived animated series DuckTales; a famous 18th-century lover in the miniseries Casanova; a rapturously reviewed Hamlet on the London stage and in a subsequent film version of the play; he even portrayed a singing detective in the U.K. series Blackpool.
That last one is a show not many people remember these days, Tennant notes, although he calls it “a really bold piece of drama from the BBC” and a “fantastic job to get.” The show people do remember him for is Doctor Who. He played the tenth Doctor in the ongoing revival of the cult British TV hit. He was succeeded by Matt Smith, now known for playing Prince Philip in The Crown, who ceded the role to another Scottish actor, Peter Capaldi, who has just made way for the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, one of Tennant’s cast mates from Broadchurch.
Tennant has said in other interviews that playing the Doctor was a childhood dream for him after he watched Tom Baker in the role in the 1970s. He says he still feels fortunate to be linked to the franchise, despite the fact he’s had to adjust to a heightened level of fame.
“They don’t really teach you about (fame) in drama school,” he says.
“It’s probably just as important to learn as voice protection or baroque dance classes.
“It’s a lovely thing to be recognized for something people love so much. It does take getting used to.”
And he admits there are “days when you’d like to be able to switch your face off. But it’s not really something to complain about,” says Tennant, who is married to actress Georgia Moffett (coincidentally, the daughter of the fifth Doctor Who, Peter Davison) and a father of four.
“I can’t pretend I wasn’t aware that if I managed to join the jobs up, a side effect was that people might want to get an autograph when you’re in the supermarket occasionally. It’s a very humbling thing.”
Next up for the busy actor — he swears he takes time off; it just looks like he doesn’t — Good Omens, a fantasy TV series created by novelist Neil Gaiman in which Tennant costars with Michael Sheen; and Camping, a Lena DunhamJenni Konner remake of a British show about an ill-fated camping trip that co-stars Jennifer Garner.