After a tumultuous run full of ups and downs and divisive plot developments, Jodie Whittaker’s tenure on Doctor Who is coming to an end in less than a week on the show’s centenary special – “The Power of the Doctor” – and the long-running sci-fi series is bidding Ncuti Gatwa welcome as the next person to pick up the sonic screwdriver and travel all of time and space in his Tardis.
Executive producer Chris Chibnall took over from Steven Moffat and Peter Capaldi in 2017 and brought Jodie on as the first female actor to tackle the role in its 50-year history. Now, four seasons on and countless adventures later, the Broadchurch alum is almost ready to regenerate and pick up her place in the wall of legendary thespians who have carried the two-thousand-year Last of the Time Lords for a little while in a tradition that’s almost as old as television itself.
Whittaker herself recently reflected on her unlikely journey in a chat with the official Doctor Who website, spilling the beans on what she’ll miss the most about the role.
“I’m not a method actor, I don’t stay in character between scenes, but I spent a lot of time before I played the Doctor doing quite emotionally traumatized roles,” she said. “[With Doctor Who] there were four seasons, there was heartbreak, there was fear and there was loss, but my overriding emotion was excitement. I felt like the overriding thing the Doctor brought was curiosity and excitement.”
The actress continued by noting that her Doctor was full of life and constantly running into adventures.
“Obviously fear, rage, and all those things, but the thing that encapsulated my Doctor the most was that bouncing into things, and that really fed into my evening and my weekend and my year. I was very half-full all day every day, so it bleeds into life… So the reason I can gush so much about this job is because it wasn’t just happiness on set, it fed into everything. I feel like it’s knocked 15 years off me because I’ve been so energized because I had to be at work that it fed outwards and I’ll miss the energy of the Doctor.”
Whittaker may have presided over one of the most controversial moments in all of Doctor Who history, but that always had to do with the quality of the scripts and the nonchalance with which they retconned the show’s continuity. As far as Whovians see it, the Thirteenth was one of the best, and he’ll live in our memories long after her run has come to a close.
You can catch “The Power of the Doctor” when it premieres on Oct. 23 across BBC platforms.