‘RUBY IS GROWING AS I’M GROWING’
Teenager Millie Gibson is braced for a legion of new young Who fans
No Time Lord is complete without his companion, and starting this Christmas, that role goes to 19-year-old Coronation Street star Millie Gibson. She’s been working quietly behind the scenes for the last year as the Doctor’s new Girl Friday (aka new character Ruby Sunday), but now she’s just weeks away from her big debut. It’s fair to say she’s a little nervous.
“I’m bracing myself to hibernate for a bit,” says Gibson, who played Kelly Neelan in the ITV soap. “I’ve been taking advantage of going out and not being recognised. As soon as Doctor Who hits, it’s going to follow me for a while.”
Russell T Davies was just a few months old when Doctor Who first aired in 1963, so it feels oddly appropriate that by the time the cameras rolled on his 2005 revival, his future leading lady was only a few weeks old herself. “The later David Tennant episodes are my earliest memory of it,” she says. “I know that might make a lot of fans say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so old!’ – I’m sorry!”
Gibson grew up on “New Who” – her Doctor was Matt Smith, and as a six-year-old she idolised his companion Amy (Karen Gillan). Endearingly, that seems to have continued. While some ex-stars of the show got in touch to congratulate her, she shyly admits reaching out to Gillan herself for a few words of advice from her hero. “We had a lovely chat,” she says happily. “It was just surreal because she was my companion! It’s weird to think Ruby might resonate with someone like she did with me.”
Gibson is appealingly unguarded. The first time we meet, she pulls me into a hug before I even tell her my name. “I’m sorry, I’m a hugger!” she laughs. Later, she tells a story about how she found out she’d landed her Doctor Who role in the middle of a spray tan, standing “orange and sticky” and crying when her agent called her. “I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t cry this tan off now!’ ” she says, imitating her own racking sobs.
She’s remarkably young – just 18 when she started filming, making her one of the youngest stars in the show’s history. Davies was keen to cast a real teenager as 18-year-old Ruby after years of seeing actors in their 20s and 30s playing younger. “The new Doctor could have been anyone,” he tells me. “With Ruby, it was specifically crafted to be just a bit younger, to have just left school, to not know where she’s going in life.
She’s open, fresh and undecided about things.”
Finding the right candidate wasn’t easy. Like her co-star Ncuti Gatwa (who was cast first), Gibson had to go through rounds of auditions carried out under farcical secrecy – she was hidden under a cloak when she entered the studios in Cardiff, and was forbidden from telling anyone who she was or where she was going.
“Even when I got picked up from Manchester at 6am, the driver said, ‘Hello, what’s your name?’ And I said Jess!” Gibson cringes. “I just lied on the spot because I was so scared.” Though there was, she admits, a certain thrill to it all. “Pulling up to the gate at Bad Wolf Studios, all the driver said to the guard was, ‘Letting a wolf in.’ And I was like… ‘I’m cool,’ ” she laughs.
She’s better at keeping secrets now. She’s tightlipped about the storylines for this year’s Christmas special and the eight-episode series airing next year, only confirming “new monsters” and that, like her, Ruby is a proud Mancunian. “I can tell you that Ruby was abandoned on Christmas Eve. So she’s adopted. And she lives in London. There’s something!” she laughs. Ruby’s secret origins kick off the story on 25 December, and the mystery functions as a “spine” to the series. “There’s a lovely innocence to her that counterbalances the Doctor. He’s got quite a robotic connection with emotions or anything human. She really does balance him out.”
There’s another thing she can say – she’s sticking around. Already, she and Gatwa have been filming a second series for 2025, a vote of confidence that also adds a bit more pressure, given that viewers haven’t seen their first episode yet. “It’s cool exploring season-two Ruby already, because she’s growing as I’m growing,” says Gibson. “I’m a bit nervous, because you’re right – people might love it. They might hate it.” She grins. “But I think it’s going to be a new era for a lot of little girls and little boys out there, watching like I did. That feels so special.”