Jodie Whittaker received furious backlash when she was cast as the first female Doctor Who. Photo / (Rozette Rago, The New York Times
The first female Doctor reveals how she weathered a furious backlash after joining the show - great preparation for playing a ‘lioness’ activist in a new Netflix drama.
Jodie Whittaker admits that she will easily get into a rage about the injustices of our times. “I’m your perfect person, as a journalist. I read [an article] and get going: ‘I’m so angry! I’ve not done any research, but I’ve read what you said and I’m absolutely aggrieved!’” She laughs - a throaty, room-filling guffaw. “I’m always f***ing fuming about this thing and that.”
It’s a fury that has fed Whittaker’s appetite for social-justice dramas. After her critically acclaimed role in the BBC prison series Time (available on Neon), she now stars in Toxic Town, a Netflix drama about one of the UK’s worst — yet little known — environmental scandals. In the 1980s and 1990s dozens of children were born close to Corby with malformed limbs, linked to the mishandling of waste during the reclamation of the Northamptonshire town’s steelworks. The scandal was exposed in The Sunday Times in 1999, but it took another 11 years for some of the families to receive compensation.
“The beauty of drama is that you can shine a light into the scenes where a documentary can’t,” Whittaker says. She plays Susan McIntyre, the powerhouse who led the mothers’ campaign after her son, Connor, was born without fingers on his left hand.
“At the very heart of the story are these lioness women fighting for what is right for their children,” Whittaker says. “It was amazing to [portray] mothers in the centre of something rather than on the outskirts. There’s a version of this show that could have put them on the periphery, but here they are the heroes.”
Whittaker, 42, met McIntyre during filming. (For her part, McIntyre tells me she was just chuffed to be played by a former Doctor.) “They didn’t sugarcoat Susan,” Whittaker says. “She is not necessarily the textbook leading lady. [Playing her] I always had a cigarette in my mouth. She isn’t neat nails, neat bob … People put her down as a mother and she just kept fighting with that cub in her teeth.”
Her first question for McIntyre, though, was: “Do you hate my accent?” McIntyre had moved from Scotland to Corby as a child. Whittaker pretends to hyperventilate as she recalls reading “does karaoke with a Glaswegian-Corby accent” in the script. “I absolutely bricked it. I think I went around the world in 80 days with my accent at the read-through,” she says, grinning. “But as the narcissistic actor, you have to lose all that, because obviously it’s not about me. I found my meeting with the mothers so emotional. I cried. I am always blown away by people who can climb a f***ing mountain with another mountain on their back.”
We are speaking on Zoom, with Whittaker in an apartment in Spain, where she is filming an ITV heist drama, Frauds, with Suranne Jones. It sounds glamorous, but she is also an ever-juggling working mother: halfway through our interview she has to decamp to the loo as her 2-year-old is vying for her attention. She also has a 9-year-old daughter with her husband, Christian Contreras, an American actor and writer whom she met in drama school.
Whittaker grew up near Huddersfield, in the village of Skelmanthorpe - known to locals as “Shat” because many of them worked shattering rocks there in the early days of railway construction. She does not come from a thespian family (her mother was a teaching assistant and her father ran his own business), but her parents regularly took her to the Alhambra theatre in Bradford. The school careers adviser at Whittaker’s comprehensive, Shelley High School, told her acting wasn’t a real job, but she went on to win a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Success came fast. Whittaker left drama school before her final term to perform at the Globe theatre, before being cast opposite Peter O’Toole in the 2006 film Venus. “Getting the Globe [job] gave me the confidence, as an unknown actor, to walk into a room and audition,” Whittaker recalls. “I was thinking, ‘Wow, being an actor is great! You don’t even finish drama school - you just leave.’” Parts in Black Mirror and Attack the Block followed, although when I tell Whittaker her CV suggests she has rarely been out of work, she laughs that brilliant laugh again. “That’s the trickery of when stuff comes out - I’ve had some panicky times.”
There has been the occasional bruising review, including for last year’s stage production of The Duchess of Malfi (The Times gave it one star, describing Whittaker’s acting as “flat and featureless”). She teases me (deservedly) when I mention this, noting that I didn’t see the play myself. “A lot of actors don’t read their reviews so you’re bloody lucky I do,” she says, without a trace of irritation. “That would have been a complete clanger otherwise. All I will say, about the entire thing, is that I had an amazing time and I was surrounded by an incredible cast.”
The ITV crime drama Broadchurch - in which Whittaker played a grieving mother, Beth Latimer - made her a household name. But for many viewers she will always primarily be the first woman to play the Doctor in Doctor Who. When she was cast in 2017 she was immediately at the centre of a storm: the prime minister at the time, Theresa May, cheered, but some fans were angry.
“It was a noisy few [people]. Rage is always really loud - compliments are much quieter,” Whittaker says. “But also, that show doesn’t have a comparison. It’s part of all our vocabularies - the Tardis, Daleks, exterminate! And everyone’s Doctor until then was a white man. They are very different actors, but they all fit a specific mould - and I didn’t.”
She says what sent her “into a spiral”, though, was the feeling that her performance would affect others. “If Peter [Capaldi] hadn’t been good as the Doctor, it would only have reflected on him. Whereas I felt that if I wasn’t very good at this, I’ve f***ed it for other actors,” she explains. “I think it’s completely unacceptable if that was the case, but that’s how I felt.”
Adding that this isn’t a “real world” problem, Whittaker starts sending herself up in a hoity-toity voice: “Oh I was really stressed out that I got this amazing job for three series.”
She remains frustrated, though, at the idea that the Doctor, when played by a woman, was no longer a role model for boys. “It’s never been questioned that I had to look up to men,” she explains. “So it was fascinating that for some, we [women] could not be role models. The Doctor is still the Doctor. But also, I was playing an alien! My gender was not the issue.”
In one way, she was actually more qualified to play a Time Lord, who has two hearts. “In the very last scene, during the regen episode, I was pregnant. So I’m the first ever Doctor that was Method and had two hearts.”
Whittaker was spared seeing much criticism, anyway, because she avoids social media. “No one can hide behind a nasty tweet because I’ll never read it,” she says. “I’m sure people wrote, ‘I hated your Doctor’ but because I go ‘la la la,’” she trills, putting her fingers in her ears, “I’ve got such a false sense of who I am.”
She sent her successor, Ncuti Gatwa, “shit tonnes” of WhatsApps. What did they say? “The main thing is that it goes so quick,” she says. “I still can’t believe my time is over. I was absolutely grief-stricken when it ended, even though it was my choice. I felt like I’d given myself 20 paper cuts. I loved it so much. But oh my God, the lines are so hard to learn! So the other thing was: I hope you are better at learning lines than I was.” The show has not prospered since Whittaker left. Ratings have fallen and last week there were reports Doctor Who might be axed.
She still loves meeting Whovians. “I’m like, ‘Don’t forget about me.’ It’s nice for me if people are still massive fans, because it means I didn’t kill it. If someone stops me and starts talking [about Doctor Who], I’ll go on and on, and I can sense them trying to leave.”
Despite this, she says people rarely recognise her. “I’ve got my sad-times Beth Latimer hair back,” she says, touching a newly brunette bob. “And I’m pretty average. I am 5ft 6in, I wear a baseball cap sometimes when I’m out and about, and sometimes I don’t. I don’t feel in a fish bowl half as much as I thought I would after Doctor Who. All I ever get is someone coming up to me and being lovely.” She smiles. “As someone who thrives on a compliment, that’s just great.”
Toxic Town in on Netflix now.
Written by: Rosamund Urwin
© The Times of London
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