On Billie Piper in The Day of the Doctor:
“I thought the story of Rose, which was beautiful, was done, I didn’t want to add to it, and I didn’t feel comfortable adding to it, really. That was always Russell‘s story. But we did want Billie. And I liked the idea of bringing back the Bad Wolf version. The way Russell ended it in “The End of Time,” by just sort of looping it around, was perfect. I didn’t want to stick another bit of it in. That would be wrong. I just wanted to get Billie Piper, one of the absolute heroes of Doctor Who, back in the show, but without interfering with the story of Rose Tyler. I just thought I might spoil something. I might trip over my bootlaces doing that.”
If Billie hadn’t agreed to return:
“There would have been options… none of them would have been as perfect as Billie, who, in some ways for me, represents the revival of Doctor Who more than anybody else. I know I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but if you look back at the first two years of Doctor Who‘s revival, it’s all about Billie. It’s all about Billie. It’s her show for two years. I mean, it’s really startling watching ‘The Runaway Bride’ and you’re going, ‘Where is she? Where’s the star of the show?’ So it was great to have her. We’d have done something else”
Whether Russell T. Davies knew of plot developments in The Day of the Doctor:
“It’s difficult with Russell because he doesn’t like spoilers. When we worked together on the show, we tried not to spoil each other. I’m really serious. When I was doing ‘Silence in the Library,’ [he said], ‘I want you to have River Song pre-figure something about what’s going to happen to Donna, and I said, ‘Don’t tell me what’s going to happen to Donna!’ And I said, ‘What kind of thing is it?’ ‘It’s sad, Steven. It’s very very sad.’ I said, ‘OK OK, I’ll put something sad in.’ Julie Gardner was sitting there saying, ‘You’re working on the same TV show. You can’t behave like this.’ But we did coordinate around some stuff and I said to him I was possibly treading on your toes, so here’s roughly what we’re going to do. He said, ‘I read half your email and then I stopped.’”
On Tom Baker:
“I know I had all of the 11 Doctors there, but you can’t have a scene with 11—or even 12— people there. You can’t do it. To have the longest-standing Doctor make an appearance and show the current Doctor where to go, well, that’s irresistible, isn’t it? It’s important that you get to hear that voice again and get all his little mannerisms into one scene. It’s just wonderful. But, you know, I get the impression—I don’t know the man at all—that he’s warmed up to doing Doctor Who and to that part of his life. He’s doing the audiobooks for Big Finish. I have a slight paranoia about ‘it seems like every bugger is playing the Doctor, more or less all of Equity. It’ll have it’s own Spotlight section next.’ I think, quite soon, it’s going to go back to a militant ‘There’s one Doctor and that’s who he is.’ He’s one man with many faces, he’s not a committee of people with unusual hair. Because we had John Hurt as well. So very shortly, we’re going back to just one Doctor.”
And in Peter Capaldi:
“All The Doctors, all The Doctors would fly in to save Gallifrey and change The Doctor’s timeline – how could you not do that? I knew there was gonna be a new one so I wrote it with not knowing who would be doing that. We did manage to cast somebody where you can use half his face for less than a second and everybody knows who he is. He looks cross! He’s brilliant. The energy, the vitality he brings to his performance. I mean, he works. He’s like Matt. He works, he’s a worker. And he’s an extraordinarily vital and physical performer. People keep talking about this elderly Doctor, as if that’s something of an achievement. But this man is not at all elderly in style. He leaps around the place probably more than any other Doctor in that first scene. But that’s not how he’s going to play it. That’s just him in the post-regeneration madness. It’s something we’re still working at.”
Comments
All opinion pieces and reviews published on this website are the personal opinions of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of this website as a whole.
Any articles based on rumours will come from a variety of sources and may be true, true in part or completely false, they should not be repeated as fact nor taken as anything other than the rumours they are until there is confirmation from official sources.
