THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
Pilot TV Deputy Editor Boyd Hilton enjoys an intergalactic afternoon with Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker
In March of last year, I jokingly suggested to Jodie Whittaker that she could be the new Doctor. At the time she was in the middle of promotional duties for the third and final series of Broadchurch, and blithely mentioned in passing that she’d recently had lunch with the show’s creator Chris Chibnall, who also happened to be the new Doctor Who showrunner. So it seemed obvious to ask whether she was touting for a guest role as an alien or something in his debut Who season.
Turns out the day before that interview, Whittaker was actually cast as the 13th Doctor.
During that meal with Chibnall, which she initially thought was “just a mates’ lunch”, he was in fact sounding her out about whether she’d be interested in becoming the first female iteration of the 2,000-year-old Time Lord. And she was very interested. After a self-filmed audition in which she pretended to defuse a bomb, and trying out some more scenes which Chibnall had specially written for all the candidates to showcase the wildly varying emotions the Doctor goes through, he told her the most high-profile role on British television was hers. As skilled as she was at keeping secrets during the filming of three Broadchurch
series, she now faced a whole new level of confidentiality. So when she was asked, even in the most light-hearted manner, if she’d thought about being the new Doctor the day after she was told she was the new Doctor, it was quite a moment.
“I went bright red when you asked me,” she says now, 18 months on. “I started panicking.” Not that I noticed her bout of sudden awkwardness. It was the great inadvertent Who
scoop that never was.
Meeting Whittaker now, over tea at a central London hotel, it’s a mere matter of weeks before the premiere of her first full Doctor Who episode. The time for official casting announcements and trailers is over. Whittaker’s Doctor is about to enter the fray for real. Critics are poised. Whovian fingers are hovering above their keyboards waiting to pass verdict. Even casual viewers are going to be watching. But Whittaker herself isn’t merely relaxed and confident, she’s full-on ebullient. And very funny with it. In the middle of a question about how her life has changed since she was announced as the new Doctor, she interjects, “You mean since I stopped lying to you…” and prepares to tuck into a cookie to go with her tea. “Make it a long question,” she says, preparing to munch down. Then, before I get the chance, she asks, “Are you a Whovian?” Yes, absolutely. Then she laughs and says: “Did you hashtag #Notmydoctor?” Certainly not.
While Whittaker’s current mood could be summed as joyful giddiness, it’s taken a while to get here. She was understandably anxious in the period between getting the role and the official announcement four months later. “The oddest thing about this job is that the reveal comes before any moment of filming,” she explains. “So after the announcement was made, I had this panic-ridden week where my name started to be bandied around and journalists started turning up at my mum and dad’s house to try to find out if they knew before. I felt like I was in the scene in Notting Hill where Rhys Ifans opens the door in his pants.”
To get a sense of just how exposed being Who would make her feel, Whittaker talked to her fellow Broadchurch
star David Tennant. She wanted to speak to “someone who just fucking knew”. He assured her it was “the most amazing job” and that the fans were amazing, too, and suggested she should invest in a few baseball caps by way of disguise. Easy.
But she still had to grapple with the unique baggage that comes with this role above all others, carrying even more weight than Bond. “Even though I’m 36, it’s overwhelming,” she explains. “And even though I know what it’s like to be looked at in the street, to a certain degree, I’ve been around David [Tennant] enough to know what it’s like when it’s everywhere.” When she was being interviewed the day after the announcement, all she kept thinking was, “everyone’s going to be fucking following me around, that’s awful”.
As soon as the shooting of the new season began, however, all those concerns fell away. From the initial shock of getting the role, through that period of postannouncement anxiety, Whittaker then immersed herself in the heady reality of actually making Doctor Who.
“The biggest surprise was how much fun it was,” she says. “I knew it was going to be hard work, I knew it would require a lot, as in the learning of lines, and that level of homework. There were days that were really hard when I was hitting my head against a brick wall after forgetting my line for the tenth time because it’s so complicated. But I’d also double over laughing every day at something. I loved every second of it.”
She credits the experienced crew with making it such a pleasurable ride. “You fit into a very well-oiled machine that’s full of banter, and love, more than anything. And then from that you can take the piss out of each other. I think it’s one of those jobs. I mean, if you’re not going to have a laugh on this….” She tails off, smiling at the memory of shooting the series.
With filming on all ten episodes plus Christmas special completed, Whittaker’s state of mind is all about acceptance. “I’ve come out of this amazing bubble of happiness, and new friendships – and feel really comfortable sitting talking about it… even though I’m shitting my pants about saying something I shouldn’t say. So it’s easy to sell this now.”
But what exactly is she selling? While one can easily picture how Whittaker’s breezy garrulousness and effortless comic timing will translate into her interpretation of the Doctor, the show itself is going through its biggest shake-up since Russell T Davies revived it in 2005. Sure, it’s still about an alien from the planet Gallifrey travelling through time and space in a police box. Everything else about Doctor Who
has been rebooted and reconfigured, from the logo and title sequence and Tardis interior, through the running time of the episodes (50 minutes, not 45), each of which will be standalone with no two-part stories, to the scheduling on Sunday evenings for the first time in Who history, and of course the little matter of not one or two, but three new companions, played by Tosin Cole, Mandeep Gill and Bradley Walsh. Plus there’s a new sonic screwdriver.
The show has been significantly revamped behind the scenes as well, with a new emphasis on the diversity of the writing and directing talent; there’s an equal split among male and female directors, while among the guest writers are black and ethnic artists such as novelist Malorie Blackman and playwright Vinay Patel.
In fact there are so many radical changes, it’s intriguing to imagine how they’ll affect the tone and style of the show. So just what is the new Doctor Who going to be like? “We want it to feel like you’re on an adventure,” says Whittaker. “To feel that you’re on a rollercoaster ride that has its elements of the creeps round the corner to the exhilarating moments to the terrifying moments, to the stillness.”
As for her and Chibnall’s interpretation of this most iconic yet changeable of characters, Whittaker’s take will emphasise the Doctor’s innate innocence. “I really loved the idea of that childlike wonder and the fact the Doctor doesn’t have that kind of third eye and self-consciousness that adults have, or necessarily the best social skills. And even knowing what a Time Lord knows and still having hope at the end of it… I love that. And I love that idea of being quite fizzy.”
An emphasis on fizz feels surprisingly new. After all, Peter Capaldi’s early Who episodes were marked by an amusing grumpiness; Matt Smith was… weird, albeit delightfully so, with his penchant for fish fingers and custard, and David Tennant was a sexy, cocky Doctor, at least on the surface. “The one thing I wanted to play was energy,” elaborates Whittaker. “Because for me it’s where I naturally sit but also I felt that the way Chris had written it, it bounced off the page. I also like the fact the Doctor can respond completely differently in every scenario. There isn’t a typical reaction other than non-violent and hopeful. There are moments of darkness for the Doctor but never giving up is