Although David Tennant will go down as one of the greatest “Doctors” on television, his most beloved role only came after he sought a second opinion.
The 2x Emmy winner revealed “there was definitely a moment where I wasn’t” going to take the titular Time Lord in the BBC series Doctor Who, in which he starred as the Tenth Doctor from 2005 to 2010.
“About 48 hours after they asked me. I had to go process everything that it meant,” he said on David Tennant Does a Podcast With…, adding: “I had an agent at the time who was like, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s not going to work.’”
Tennant noted it wasn’t his current agent who gave him the advice, but “a previous brilliant agent who’s since retired,” admitting “she didn’t call that correctly.”
Following his three-season tenure as the Tenth Doctor in the revived series, Tennant returned to the show as the Fourteenth Doctor in 2022.
David Tennant in ‘Doctor Who’ (BBC Studios)
BBC
Last year, Russell T. Davies spoke to Deadline about returning to the series with its current Disney+ reboot, after he revived the series in 2005, following its original run from 1963 to 1989. With Ncuti Gatwa taking the lead as the current Fifteenth Doctor, Davies explained he “wanted the show to be fun and a bit nuts.”
“I think there’s an awful lot of television now, and I watch an awful lot of television, but I think there’s so much television that [sticks too rigidly] to the three-act structure,” he said. “You know when there are 10 minutes left to go, when there’s going to be a major event, or when the murderer is going to be caught. So, I think it’s time for a show just to break those rules.”
