Doctor Who’s Jodie Whittaker: ‘The pandemic has skyrocketed my paranoia’
It’s 3.30pm on a rainy Wednesday and Jodie Whittaker is just back from a medical appointment. Buoyant and bouncy, she’s thrilled to have had a negative result from her mandatory Covid test, so she can head off to Cardiff to don the Doctor’s coat, after almost a year of postponed filming.
‘That was the highlight of my day,’ she laughs. ‘Now I’ve got to sort the house out and pack my stuff – you take going away for granted so much until it’s gone.’
We’re chatting on Zoom, from her home in London, where she lives with her husband, American actor Christian Contreras, and their five-year-old daughter. Purposefully positioned in front of a white wall, adorned with only a smattering of Blu Tack (in case I scrutinise her interiors taste), she has been experiencing off-the-scale anxiety levels throughout the Covid roller coaster of 2020 and is craving some sense of normality.
‘I’m pretty anxious anyway, so it [the pandemic] has skyrocketed my paranoia,’ she says. ‘That worst-case scenario, that I cause someone ill health, I cause them long Covid… I’m a follower of a rule and I need things to be really clear, otherwise it sends me into an apocalyptic panic attack.’
Rules are exactly what she’ll get on the Doctor Who set, when she returns for her third season. Daily temperature checks, strict protocols and clear guidelines on what she can and can’t do – essentially constrained to work and living in her family bubble. Jodie and her husband and daughter always stay in the same house in Cardiff each time. ‘I can’t wait to get back,’ she says. ‘Lockdown reminded me that I really love my job.’
Jodie first took on the role of the Doctor in 2017 and will be back on our screens imminently for a Christmas special. Filmed last year, the one-off episode sees the return of some particularly unfestive Daleks, and the Doctor on the run from a high-security alien prison – in other words, exactly the sort of other-worldly japes and drama you’d hope for from a Christmas special.
She is famously the first woman to play the Doctor in the show’s 57-year history, following 12 male actors before her. Recent incarnations have been her friend and Broadchurch co-star David Tennant, The Crown’s Matt Smith and The Thick of It’s Peter Capaldi, from whom Jodie took over. By the time she was cast at 35, she had a CV spanning everything from St Trinian’s and Attack the Block to Broadchurch and Black Mirror. And becoming the first female Doctor didn’t intimidate her in the slightest.
Firstly, in her mind, a man had no more rights to the part than she did, ‘because it’s playing an alien, so the rule book is open’. Secondly, she was brought up in a home where gender roles weren’t a thing. ‘My family was progressive, without us knowing that’s what it was,’ she explains. ‘My mum and dad just brought up two kids, and my brother came first, so I ended up adopting a lot of his hobbies. I played cricket because he did, but then he took up squash, because I liked it. And I had proper 1980s short spiky hair, too, because I wanted it to look like his.’
Today, she’s wearing a pinstriped, buttoned-up YMC shirt and matching wide-legged trousers. A fan of oversized clothing, she says she can get ‘very excited’ about a boilersuit and trainers. ‘Growing up, a lot of people would say, “You’re a tomboy,” but I wasn’t – I was just me,’ she says. ‘Now, I love the fact that there is so much androgyny in clothes. I love that I could be wearing the same thing as Timothée Chalamet.’ She’s pretty unbothered by the idea of make-up, too. Today’s was done in a dash after she discovered our interview was over Zoom and not by phone, but mostly, she says, she doesn’t bother. ‘You can’t even tell I’ve put any on,’ she shrieks, scrutinising her face in the computer screen. ‘I’m glad I made such an effort!’
Although the gender politics of taking on Doctor Who was not a big deal to Jodie, the idea of the ensuing fame of such a beloved, global show made her pause. Her fiercely anti-celebrity attitude to fame (eschewing any form of social media) meant a prime-time lead role was a terrifying prospect. ‘What if it meant you literally couldn’t walk around?’ she says, in a thick Yorkshire accent that hasn’t wavered since moving to London in her late teens from her family home near Huddersfield.
‘I had this idea that fame from Doctor Who would be like that Notting Hill image of Rhys Ifans [opening the front door to paparazzi] and it isn’t. If you bump into a Whovian, it genuinely makes both of your days. There’s something emotional, poetic and very humbling about being in the show, because you’re a tiny little jigsaw piece of something that is so precious to so many people.’ Can she see herself playing the Doctor for a while? ‘I haven’t even looked at another role since the Doctor, apart from doing Who Do You Think You Are? earlier this year. To even question an end point [of Doctor Who] would be too upsetting.’
Doctor Who not only elevated Jodie’s stature as an actor, but it gave her a chance to explore a lighter direction. Her previous roles had often required her to access darker emotions, from the bereaved Beth Latimer, a mother whose son had been murdered in 2013’s television series Broadchurch, to the wife of a brain-damaged boxer in Paddy Considine’s 2017 film, Journeyman.
‘I’ve never felt I was a method actor,’ she says. ‘With a job like Broadchurch, they’d say, “cut!” and I’d wipe off the snot [from crying], get myself a coffee and have a bit of a cuddle with Olivia [Colman] or a chat with DT [David Tennant] and shake it off. So, it’s not like you go home and you are [pulls a face of being distraught], but I must have, for a long time, existed on quite a high level [of emotion].’
She describes the Doctor as the absolute antithesis of those roles. The series showrunner, Chris Chibnall, who also created and wrote Broadchurch, tailor-made a version of the Doctor for her; a Doctor who would play to all Jodie’s strengths, focusing on her high energy levels – today, she talks at a million miles an hour, laughs frequently, gesticulates wildly and is constantly pulling faces.
‘You can tell from talking to me, my personality is this,’ she points to herself, ‘and not this [pulls sad face]. So, with Doctor Who, it was, you want me to be manic? Got that in the bag! You want me to fidget? OK, brill. The idea of playing the Doctor, which was terrifying at first, became less terrifying, because, as a person, I’m not that far away.’
Another character she has particular fondness for is that of Anna in 2016’s indie film Adult Life Skills, directed by her friend Rachel Tunnard. Filmed a little while after the devastating death of her three-year-old nephew, Harry, who had Down’s syndrome, she played a sister grieving the loss of her twin. ‘It was emotionally the hardest thing I’ve had to do,’ she says of acting a scene where Anna finally let go of her grief. ‘It felt like life was imitating art.’
Three years later, Jodie was asked to take part in a Children in Need project by her actor friend Shaun Dooley, who co-starred with her in Broadchurch and Doctor Who. Actors were asked to sing cover versions for a Children in Need album, which was recorded for the BBC1 show. Jodie dedicated her performance of Coldplay’s Yellow to Harry.
‘Coldplay was played at his funeral and Coldplay was played throughout his very short and beautiful life,’ she said on the show. She sings, her voice thick with emotion, in front of a photograph of Harry, as his parents – her brother, Christian, and his wife, Katie – watch on, and it is impossible not to feel their loss.
‘I am really private, but sometimes you have to let your guard down a bit,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t matter how successful you are – you can’t buy health. Doing that show meant that people could emotionally connect and say, “That’s our family story as well.”’
But as well as raising money for the charity, it led to her meeting two of Coldplay themselves, when guitarist Jonny Buckland and drummer Will Champion turned up as a surprise at the Abbey Road recording studio. ‘I’d fully stalked Coldplay before,’ Jodie laughs. ‘I was an extra in their Charlie Brown video in 2011. So I was so embarrassed because I thought, “I hope you don’t remember me – that person who volunteered to come in for free to be an extra for a job I actually do.”’
As a child growing up in Huddersfield, her strengths lay in sport and drama, rather than academia. ‘I was always very imaginative as a kid,’ she says. ‘I was a really good self-entertainer; every single toy had its own voice.’
Her parents, father Adrian, now a retired CEO, and mother, Yvonne, who was a childminder and teaching assistant, did everything they could to encourage her ambition. ‘ I was lucky that my pipe dream of, “That’s what I want to do when I’m older,” wasn’t met with, “That’s not a proper job,” by my family.’
After studying drama at GCSE level and leaving school at 18, Jodie worked in a local factory, a care home and in bars to raise money to go on a solo round-the-world trip. She came home to take up a place at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she met her husband, Christian (they married in 2008 in Arizona, where he’s from).
In the end, her Guildhall training ended a few months early, when, in 2005, she was offered the chance to make her professional debut in The Storm at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, directed by Mark Rylance.
‘What a thing to do as your first-ever job,’ she grins. ‘Mark is lovely and funny, and his energy filtered down – it was magical.’
As soon as that season ended, she was cast in Roger Michell’s 2006 film, Venus, alongside Peter O’Toole – it was a brilliant performance and one that put her firmly on the map. ‘I had the cockiness of, “I’m at the Globe,”’ she laughs, ‘so I bounded into my audition and tricked everyone into thinking I should be in a scene with Peter O’Toole. Then you work on Cranford (the BBC period drama) and in the green room, it’s me and Michelle Dockery, who I was at drama school with, looking around, going, “This is exciting, innit?!” I’ve always been aware those moments are not to be taken for granted. I’ve been really lucky; I haven’t worked with any a—holes – unless I am the a—hole…’
The phrase ‘down to earth’ is rarely one associated with actors, but with Jodie you can’t imagine anything else. There is a clip from a 2018 episode of Graham Norton where she is explaining to his guests Lady Gaga, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper that the village she grew up in, Skelmanthorpe, is referred to be locals as ‘Shat’. There is a Shat Pizza, a Shat Taxi, she guffaws, as they all laugh politely. ‘One glass of sauvignon blanc and chatty Whittaker comes out,’ she laughs, rolling her eyes. You sense her childhood best friends, still her lifeline to this day, are partly responsible for keeping her grounded.
‘We’ve been a core group from the beginning,’ she says of her six school ‘lifers’, the name she gives to her group of best friends, with a few added along the way, like Doctor Who’s Mandip Gill. ‘One of my best mates, Tor, has no idea what I do. It’s hilarious. She’s like, “Apparently you were in that,” and I’m like, “Yeah, it was quite a famous show…” It’s good to be reminded that while what you’re doing is the best thing in the world for you, it can’t bleed into everyone else’s life as the best thing about their lives. I think, as actors, we can sometimes become a bit confused about how valuable we are.’
She also remains incredibly close to her parents, usually spending Christmas period with them. This year, however, as for all of us, things might look a little different. ‘In a normal, non-Covid year,’ she says, ‘I would alternate between a small family Christmas in the UK, then the next year have a massive American Christmas with my husband’s family. And every year me and my six lifers clear our diaries and have another Christmas together. Obviously, we can’t do that this year.’
Jodie might not know what’s in store for Christmas, but has her downtime sparked any new ambitions? ‘I’d like to continue to have an unpredictable career. I love that my CV has random things like St Trinian’s on it. As for my social plans, I’ve got Glastonbury tickets for next year and my aim is to use them. I can’t wait to be in a crowd again.’ Festivals? Well, they might seem a faraway dream right now – but I guess when you’re the Doctor, anything can happen.
Doctor Who, ‘Revolution of the Daleks’, will air on BBC One over the festive period
