INTERVIEW BY PAUL KIRKLEY
Lab worker Erica (Rachel Denning) in The Pyramid at the End of the World (2017).
Rachel Denning’s first memory of Doctor Who is playing the theme tune on the recorder at a primary school concert. She was ten years old, and the show had been off the air for a long time. “Even though I was born in 1986, I feel like Doctor Who was always around,” she says. “It’s sort of like a backdrop to life, isn’t it?” What that girl in Essex couldn’t have known was that 20 years later she would not only meet Doctor Who – she’d help him save the world.
It started with a phone call just before Christmas 2016. “My agent said, ‘I’ve got you an amazing meeting,’” Rachel recalls. “And she was right, it was amazing. It was for Doctor Who!” The meeting led to her being cast as research scientist Erica – a leading guest role in The Pyramid at the End of the World. “I really liked the character as soon as I read her,” says Rachel. “I thought she was very intelligent. I liked the fact she was the one who survived! She’s very clever – quite dry, quite measured. A bit like me, really.
Well, apart from the intelligence bit… “And also, as an actress of short stature, I liked the fact they got me in to play a character where the height wasn’t really a thing – it wasn’t mentioned. Which is how it should be, I think.” Rachel was born with achondroplasia, a bone disorder that results in restricted growth (she is 4’ 1”). But Erica’s height doesn’t factor at all in Peter Harness and Steven Moffat’s script. “What’s interesting is, once you put it in front of an audience – and Doctor Who is a great platform for that – they just accept it,” she says. “In the feedback I got, there was hardly any comment on my height – it was all about Erica, the character. We should give audiences a bit more credit, I think.”