Oh
@Mr Stickyfingers the boyhood pics are so precious, you really should enter a superfan comp with those, your awesome art work and general passion would surely win.
More about our new doctor
Jodie Whittaker: the 'force of nature' taking on Doctor Who
People who have worked with the Yorkshire-born star say she is hardworking, hilarious, and perfect for the role
Jodie Whittaker was 23 years old and newly graduated from drama school when she was cast in her first on-screen role as the title character in
Venus, opposite none other than
Peter O’Toole. Being required to hold one’s own against the then seven-time Oscar-nominated acting legend might have daunted some actors, but the young woman from Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire seemed surprised at the suggestion.
“Everyone kept asking: ‘Where did the director find you?’, like he had picked me up on a train platform or something,” she told a journalist at the time. In fact, having left drama school early for a part at the Globe theatre opposite Mark Rylance, another formidable co-star, she had “rocked up” at the audition feeling full of confidence. “I know I seem like I’m something from a documentary. But, eh – no.”
This solid, unshowy self-belief has steered Whittaker through a career, in the 12 years since, that has encompassed period roles, comedy and anguished dramatic performances, most notably her acclaimed portrayal of the bereaved mother Beth Latimer in three series of
Broadchurch.
It will also, no doubt, be helpful in the next few months as Whittaker assumes one of the most talked-about roles in television history, as the
first female Doctor in Doctor Who’s 54-year history.
The teasing announcement of Whittaker’s casting, screened immediately after Sunday’s Wimbledon men’s final, caused an immediate shockwave, notably on social media, where a minority of enraged
Doctor Who fans declared they would never watch the programme again, and tens of thousands of people retweeted
a video of a young girl’s astonished delight that “the new Doctor is a girl!”.
“I got a news alert on my phone and I thought: ‘I just can’t believe that,’” says Anthony Wilcox, who directed Whittaker in the feature film
Hello Carter in 2013. “And then, 10 seconds later, I thought, well of course – she is absolutely perfect.”
Why? “She is exactly the sort of person you would want to go on an adventure with, and who you would back to lead you out of trouble. You can imagine her getting the better of a Dalek and leaving a smile on your face at the same time, and those two things combined make it an ideal piece of casting.”
Though she had not quite, until Sunday at least, broken into household name territory, a glance at the roles Whittaker has played reveals why her face, at least, is likely to be familiar. Early parts in the St Trinian’s movies were followed by performances in the costume dramas Cranford and Marchlands, the adaptation of Sarah Waters’s book The Night Watch and Joe Cornish’s cult zombie-meets-hoodie thriller
Attack the Block, which also launched the career of the Star Wars actor John Boyega.
She appeared in an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, as Anne Hathaway’s best friend in the film adaption of the bestseller One Day and in the highly regarded film about the Belfast punk scene Good Vibrations, managing a faultless Northern Irish accent.
But her quietly devastating performance in Broadchurch was key to clinching the Doctor Who role, not least because
Chris Chibnall, the writer of Broadchurch, is the new executive producer of the sci-fi show. Whittaker, he said this week, had always been his first choice to take over from Peter Capaldi as the 13th Doctor, describing her as “a super-smart force of nature”.
The same term is used by Christian Burgess, vice-principal and director of drama at the
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, who taught Whittaker when she first joined the school as a mouthy northerner whose background was very different to that of many of her classmates. They have remained close friends since.
“I think initially Jodie felt she hadn’t had a very powerful formal education, but she has got this innate actor’s intelligence which she gradually came to recognise as being much more useful than having been to Oxford or Cambridge,” he says.
“She’s fearless, that’s the thing. And when she decides she wants a job – and she’s quite selective about what she wants to do – she goes into a room and convinces them that they have to have her.”
He recalls running into Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the script for Venus, who told him: “That girl Jodie is amazing!” The novelist and screenwriter had originally written the role for a Londoner, but the young actor had convinced him it should be played by a northerner – and that northerner should be her.
In her final year, Burgess recalls, Whittaker played a small role in a production in which she had to briefly ride a bike – “and her agent signed her on the basis of riding this bicycle across the stage”. Why? “She was hilarious, and laughing. So free. She has this freedom in her body. And they recognised it.” It has been a very useful story, he notes, to tell students in subsequent years who complain about not being given bigger parts.
A former drama school classmate and close friend, who watched as Whittaker was the first in their year to be snapped up by an agent, says: “The ones [in our class] who did particularly well early on were people who were very switched on, had figured out the business very quickly and also knew themselves very well. That’s something Jodie did very well. She knows who she is.”
