THE DWM INTERVIEW

From the revelations of The Timeless Children to surviving lockdown and embarking on Series 13 in the midst of a pandemic… JODIE WHITTAKER tells EMILY COOK how she’s dealt with a year like no other.

The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) emerges from the TARDIS onto a space platform in the far future in Can You Hear Me? (2020)

Director Jamie Magnus Stone talks Jodie through a scene in The Timeless Children (2020).

Tecteun (Seylan Baxter) attempts to become the rst Gallifreyan to regenerate, in The Timeless Children.

”I like the colour tone on your wall behind you,” says Jodie Whittaker, as Doctor Who Magazine logs onto Zoom.

“Everyone always talks about what you have in the background on Zoom, don’t they?” she continues. “What books you put on show on your bookshelf. I do the complete opposite and go with a plain, white background.”

Jodie’s set-up is actually rather chic. She’s stationed on a comfy-looking chair in a cosy, clutter-free corner, contentedly sipping herbal tea from an eye-catching mug.

“Honestly, I really appreciate you picking up on my mug,” Jodie says, beaming. “It’s something that’s come out of lockdown: I’ve now got an obsession with ceramics. Two weeks before the first lockdown - before we even knew that we’d be going into a lockdown - I went to Berlin with one of my girlfriends. We had no idea that trip would end up being so precious, because very soon afterwards everything shut down.

“Anyway, it was a trip that had been planned for two years: just the two of us, no families, no kids. We went for two days and we had the best time. And there was this ceramic company there called Hotel Amano. They’re a Portuguese company but they sell out of Berlin and I seriously loved their stuff. Literally, on the way home my suitcase was like ‘CLACK, CLACK, CLACK!’ And now I keep buying mugs, because during lockdown I’ve never drunk so much coffee and tea. I’m like, ‘Oh, I really need a different mug today.’ I do love my ceramics.”

We’ve got a lot to catch up on. Since Jodie’s last DWM interview, Series 12 has aired and everything we thought we knew about the Doctor has been thrown into doubt.

“Before I even read the scripts, I was very aware that this season was going to have a big story arc for the Doctor.”

“Before I even read the scripts, I was very aware that this season was going to have a big story arc for the Doctor,” she says, casting her mind back. “I knew that what we know of the Doctor’s history would be thrown into question. I certainly knew that there would be a moment with another Doctor. But initially I didn’t know anything about how that moment would play out or what the interaction would be. I didn’t know if it was in the sense of a flashback to the Timeless Child or something else entirely. There were so many different ways of interpreting it. But when I found out about the whole gene-splice thing, and the reasons why there’s another Doctor, I was like, ‘WHAT THE…?!’