David Tennant may be one of the most beloved actors to ever play the title role in “Doctor Who,” but if he had listened to his agent’s advice he wouldn’t have taken the role.
On the latest episode of “David Tennant Does a Podcast With…,” the Scottish thespian was joined by his wife, fellow actor Georgia Tennant. The two reminisced on David Tennant’s career, including when he got the call to play the 10th Doctor in 2005. Georgia Tennant recalled how writer-producer Russell T Davies and producer Julie Gardner started eyeing David for the role after working with him on the comedy drama “Casanova.”
“Things aren’t working out with [ninth Doctor] Christopher Eccleston, something goes wrong there, they’re looking for a new Doctor. ‘Doctor Who’ hasn’t even been on yet though, so we don’t know if this is going to be a hit or a damn squib,” Georgia Tennant said. “But they come to you, they sort of lure you to the house with, ‘Come watch a bit of an episode.’ You go along and then they go, ‘And guess what! Do you want to play it?’ And you pretend to think about it for like a day or something.”
“Oh, it was longer than that,” David Tennant interjected, to which Georgia replied: “Yeah, but you were clearly going to do it.”
David Tennant conceded that maybe he “was clearly going to do it,” but “there was definitely a moment when I wasn’t” about 48 hours after getting the call.
“I sort of had to process everything that it meant, and I had an agent at the time that was like, ‘Don’t touch it, it’s not going to work,’” he revealed. “Not my current agent, a previous brilliant agent who’s since retired, but she didn’t call that correctly as it turns out. She said, ‘It’s not going to work, you don’t want to have that hung around your neck.’”
Though the role catapulted David Tennant to fame and critical acclaim, he admitted it did come with some challenges in regards to adjusting to the sudden spotlight.
“It takes a bit of getting used to, for sure,” he said. “Suddenly, you’ve got to establish what the rules are for yourself and there’s not really anyone to help you or teach you … It’s just that sense of it all getting away from you very quickly. At its worst, that’s quite panic-inducing because you just feel exposed, you just feel very vulnerable.”
David Tennant has gone on to help other iterations of the Doctor deal with the pressures of the character, including the 15th and current Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, who took the reins from Tennant after he reprised the role for the show’s 60th anniversary specials. In an interview with Variety, Gatwa called Tennant a “guiding therapist father figure,” adding that he advised him about “the things to read, and the things not to read.”
The second season of Gatwa’s iteration of “Doctor Who” premieres on the BBC and Disney+ on April 12.
From Variety US