Matt Smith--The Biography

by Emily Herbert

  When the time came to join Equity, the actors’ union, there was already a David McDonald on the books, and so, taking his new surname from Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, David Tennant was born. David’s professional debut came about when he was still 16 and at school: he took part in an anti-smoking film made by the Glasgow Health Board. His career took off rapidly, with many performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as on television – and in 1996 he appeared in the film Jude, in which he shared a scene with Christopher Eccleston. Many other performances followed, including the lead in Casanova, and the part of Barty Crouch Jnr in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

  When the news first broke that Doctor Who was to return to the screen, David’s name came up in connection with it, although he eventually lost out to Christopher Eccleston. When Eccleston stepped down, however, the role went straight to David – although he was not to become the first ‘kilted Doctor’. Instead, he employed an English accent for the role.

  As with his predecessor, David was drawn by the quality of what was on offer. Yes, he had always been a huge fan, but that was not the only reason he wanted the role. ‘I responded to what was in the script,’ he said. ‘I tried not to sit down and work out a list of self-conscious quirks because I think it can become cloyingly quirky, in the wrong way. I think idiosyncrasies are better born than imposed, so I just responded to what Russell had written. We just bumbled through it, really.’

  One early indication of the rapturous response his Doctor was to provoke was when he was greeted with mild hysteria at Comic-Con (a comic book and popular arts convention in San Diego). ‘It was great fun,’ he said rather proudly. ‘It was such an extraordinary experience. I wanted to crowd dive, but they were all sitting down. It was a bit disappointing for me. I figured that was probably the only opportunity in my life that I was going to get to do that. I should have done it.’

  Christopher had denied that he was much of a Who fan when growing up; David, on the other hand, could scarcely believe his luck. ‘Who wouldn’t want to be the Doctor? I’ve even got my own Tardis!’ he proclaimed. The first viewing of the Tenth Doctor came towards the end of 2005, when he regenerated at the end of ‘The Parting Of The Ways’; his first full outing was the Christmas 2005 special, ‘The Christmas Invasion’.

  There had been widespread disappointment when Christopher announced that he was stepping down, but the new boy soon proved to be something else. The chemistry between the Doctor and Rose was terrific and the monsters were getting scarier with each episode. His immersion in the role was complete: he didn’t just play Doctor Who on television, but also voiced the role for an animated version, read audiobooks, appeared with Peter Davison in a Doctor Who special for Children In Need and ended up being voted for as the ‘coolest character’ on UK television. He had fulfilled his childhood dreams and then some – and the nation was absolutely lapping it up.

  The Tenth Doctor went through a number of assistants. Rose had fallen in love with him and so Russell T Davies allowed her happy ending: another, human, version of the Doctor was created and the two of them went off to live in a parallel dimension. The Doctor’s second assistant was Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman); she had the hots for him, too. (So, by this time, did quite a number of the fans.) Kylie Minogue appeared in an episode called ‘Voyage of the Damned’ as a waitress called Astrid; another assistant was Donna Noble (Catherine Tate).

  ‘Everyone said I would adore working with David, and they were right,’ said Kylie afterwards. ‘He made me feel at ease. I also felt he trusted me, which was important – it was a step back into acting for me. My time on Doctor Who was hard work, but I felt somehow I was “home”.’

  Russell was well aware of the importance of the assistants. ‘That’s been a vital part of the format,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a man who’s 906 years old, and he’s an alien, and he’s a Time Lord. He’s wonderfully human, but he has that huge other dimension of being practically immortal and hugely wise, which is dangerous. The human person just brings him down to earth, literally. In the old days of the series, the companion wasn’t quite so well developed, but that wasn’t the purpose then. Now, in bringing it back, to have the female lead attract people, not just Billie Piper but of Catherine Tate status, to the series, you’ve got to write it well, otherwise you’re not going to get them. One of the joys of the whole show was to work with people like that.’

  As David’s Doctor just got more and more popular, he found himself having to cope with a level of fame that he wouldn’t have been able to imagine before. Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for the role; perhaps it was just because he was so very good at it, but fans just could not leave him alone. David was mobbed everywhere he went; there was intense interest in his personal life, and this merely intensified when it emerged he was going out with Georgia Moffett, who not only played his daughter (sort of) in one episode, but was the real life daughter of the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. ‘You know you’re going to have to cope with it on some level, but until it happens to you I defy anyone to really know what it feels like,’ he said. ‘When I saw people who were famous, and people whispered and pointed, it felt as though a very powerful individual had walked by. And actually, once you are that person, it just feels scary. All the time.’

  The presence of Billie Piper helped. ‘She’d been through it for years,’ said David. ‘And she had it much worse – women tend to. She had become such a great friend and a real help through the madness that was beginning to explode. And then losing her, and thinking: “I’m on my own!”’

  David was perhaps the first of the Doctors to become an out-and-out heart throb, a ‘Timephwoard’ as one person put it. Billie certainly noticed his appeal.

  ‘I resisted jumping his bones,’ she said rather inelegantly, ‘but women really fancy him. He’s got a gorgeous face, and an energy that’s contagious – the spirit of a child. My girlfriends were all in love with him. He’s avoided any scandal because he keeps shtoom. He very rarely talks about anything that isn’t related to his career or acting. You never see him falling out of clubs. He’s never off his face. He’s got far more patience than I have. I don’t mind signing autographs, but it becomes the topic of conversation at every social event you go to. It starts off: “So how are you?’” Then it’s: “Anyway, about Doctor Who…” It’s at that point I start reaching for the wine.’

  But no one was a keener Who fan than David: he had been one all his life. The fact that he and the fans all loved the character was another element to it all: Doctor Who meant as much to him as it did to them. There was no way he was going to mess it up. And the stories just got better and the bad guys (or monsters) scarier. John Simm was brought in as the latest incarnation of The Master and he, too, garnered enormous praise.

  But all good things must come to an end, and that applied to David Tennant’s Doctor, too. Acutely aware of that typecasting issue, and very wisely realising that it was better to leave at a time of his own choosing, rather than being forced out, after four years in the role, David decided it was time to step down. Russell was thinking about moving on, too. It had been quite a ride for the two of them, and Russell, in particular, could claim to have changed the face of Saturday night television, creating a drama that all the family were interested in. But it was time to move on.

  The two could be forgiven, however, for waxing a little nostalgic, as they looked back over the show. Russell adored the Daleks, thinking them the greatest villains ever. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Better than anything. Better than Darth Vader. Better than Satan. My greatest joy is them working again, after all these years. Everyone said we should redesign them, and it’s the one thing I dug my heels in on. That felt like madness at the time.’

  And then there was the issue of time travel itself. ‘Who wants to see what happened in the past?’ he enquired (although Tennant’s Doctor had certainly gone backwards as well as forwards). ‘I know what happened! The one thing I’ll never know is what happens in the future. Th
at drives me mad, it really does – in 10,000 years, what will this planet be? It’s terrible not to know.’

  Given the quality of the writing and the production, it was hardly surprising that David’s departure was probably both the most dramatic, and the most touching, to date. For a start, the Doctor appeared to be developing a Messiah complex. In an episode entitled ‘The Waters of Mars’ (which appropriately featured terrifying monsters, zombie-like creatures with faces like cracked mud, who gushed copious amounts of water), the Doctor, sans assistant, lands on Mars on what he realises is to be the final day of a Mars mission manned by Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan), which for unexplained reasons, self destructs. It had been drummed into the head of the Doctor and the viewers that he must not interfere in the course of human history (and those zombies are a clue as to why the mission blew itself up), but the Doctor starts to feel omnipotent and saves them. Adelaide, when she realises what he’s done, shoots herself anyway.

  The last episode of all, ‘The End of Time, Part Two’, managed to be a tearjerker on top of everything else. The Doctor knows he is about to die: the prophecy, ‘He will knock four times’ looms (although no one knew quite how that was going to happen). David Tennant was in no doubt about the effect it was going to have on the viewers – he was already sad enough.

  ‘Coming to the final episodes, you think will these live up to one’s hopes for what that finale will be?’ he said on BBC Breakfast. ‘And then you read the script – the Doctor’s been told he’s going to die, he knows he’s going to die, so you get to play that new flavour with this character that you’ve got to know so well … suddenly you’re playing a man who knows his end is coming. He’s been told: “He will knock four times”, and you get The Master with these four beats in his head and you think, well, that’s what that is. When you find out tomorrow night what that really means – [it] just breaks your heart – it’s brilliant.’

  But it wasn’t The Master, who had by now been revealed as having been driven mad at the age of eight, when he looked into the Untempered Schism and saw the entire vortex; ever since he had heard four drum beats – the ‘drums of war’ – in his head. It was someone totally different. The Doctor manages to escape all manner of The Master’s unpleasantness only to see that his sometime companion Wilfred Mott, Donna Noble’s grandfather, quite brilliantly played by Bernard Cribbins, is trapped in a chamber and will be exposed to radiation unless the Doctor sacrifices himself. To attract the Doctor’s attention, he knocks – four times. The end is nigh.

  The Doctor duly sacrifices himself and is allowed a quick tour of duty around many other cast members, times and places, before it’s time to meet his fate. Ood Sigma, one of the race of telepathic humanoids known as the Ood, appears to tell him that the universe will sing him to sleep: ‘This song is ending, but the story never ends,’ he says. The Doctor prepares himself and mouths his last words, the last words of what had been one of the most popular characters ever to be seen on British television. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he says.

  CHAPTER 4

  GERONIMO!

  To say that Matt Smith had a hard act to follow was much like commenting that the Atlantic Ocean was a little wet. It didn’t even begin to sum up what was required of him: not since the glory days of the great Tom Baker had a Doctor been quite as popular, and even then, when Peter Davison took over, the pressure then wasn’t what it was now. For a start, there was no internet, no fan sites, no instant messaging and no reaction from the rest of the world to deal with as soon as it hit the screen. If Matt were to pull it off, he would have to hit the ground running – and then some.

  After his brief appearance in the two-part special ‘The End Of Time’, Matt made his debut proper in the first episode of the latest series, ‘The Eleventh Hour’. In the final stages of his previous incarnation, the Doctor had sent the Tardis, but the energy surrounding his regeneration is such that it goes crashing back to earth, where it finally settles in the back garden of a young girl called Amy Pond. There is some slapstick humour between the two of them as the Doctor tries out every type of food he can find in the kitchen in an effort to establish his new tastes, before the real story line begins. Amy leads him upstairs to investigate a crack in her bedroom wall, a crack that the viewer will learn is actually a crack in the very fabric of the universe, and one that will return over and again as the Doctor’s adventures with Amy begin.

  Forced to attend to the Tardis, the Doctor promises that he will be back in five minutes; in actual fact, he overshoots somewhat and returns 12 years later. Amy is now a young woman, wearing the uniform of a policewoman (in fact, she’s a kissogram) and the usual crisis surrounding the continuation of the earth’s very existence soon begins. That crack in the wall had allowed Prisoner Zero to escape from a race called the Atraxi, who now want him back: if he doesn’t appear, the earth will be incinerated. The Doctor eventually ensures Prisoner Zero is returned to the Atraxi. The earth has been saved, yet again – for now.

  The story, which was written by Steven Moffat and had some typically Moffat-esque moments – Prisoner Zero hiding in a room that is usually invisible in the house (it can only been seen out of the corner of your eye) was setting the stage for what was to come. Viewers met the new companion, Amy, of whom more anon, and her boyfriend Rory, who was also set to travel through time and space. It laid out the new Doctor’s style: manic, running everywhere and with brilliant comic timing.

  Every Doctor has a unique appearance and Matt stood out here, too. Initially he is seen in the battered remains of the Tenth Doctor’s last outfit, leading Amy to refer to him as the ‘raggedy Doctor’; however, towards the end of the show, he began donning the outfits that would become his.

  He raided the local hospital’s changing room (explaining this away by pointing out that he had just saved the earth for ‘the millionth time’) and procured a rather donnish outfit consisting of a brown tweed jacket with elbow patches, rolled up trousers, black boots and a bow tie. One frequent refrain throughout the show is that, ‘Bow ties are cool.’ There was grumbling in some quarters about this, with some fans saying it was an outfit better suited to an older man, but Matt was tall and slim and could carry it off. And it was certainly better than the original planned alternative: the journalist Benjamin Cook, a great Doctor Who aficionado, described it as ‘a little like something Captain Jack Sparrow wears in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.’ But Matt demurred at the suggestion, saying that it wasn’t the kind of thing the Doctor himself would choose to wear. Rather, Matt wanted to hark back to the style of the Second Doctor, as played by Patrick Troughton, whom he had adored when he first saw him in ‘The Tomb Of The Cybermen’.

  The series began on 3 April 2010, and met with a broadly positive response. ‘The moment the Tardis crash lands in an English country garden … Smith faces down any doubters with aplomb. Smith might turn out to be one of the best Time Lords of the lot,’ said Sinclair McKay, in the Mail on Sunday. Benji Wilson, in the Daily Telegraph, wrote, ‘It was ridiculous but it felt right: mad, alien, brand new but very old. A+ to the casting director. A+ to Smith.’

  Matthew Bell, in the Observer, said: ‘From the moment he appeared, dangling from the doorway of his time machine, the new boy demonstrated that he can more than fill the shoes of his predecessor. Matt Smith fights aliens. He wears tweed. He loves custard. He is the Doctor. And he might be more the Doctor than anyone who was the Doctor before.’ And Roland White for The Times wrote: ‘The previous doctor, David Tennant, smouldered his way across the space-time continuum. Smith is more of a geek-chic Time Lord … Smith is a much more quixotic, light-hearted Doctor than Tennant, who seemed to carry the cares of the universe on his shoulders.’

  And so the Doctor, Amy and occasionally Rory, began to explore the universe. Their first port of call was to Starship UK, in an adventure called ‘The Beast Below’, which had an exceedingly green theme. The entire population of the UK had been put on a colony spaceship, which is ruled by a woman ca
lled Liz 10 (also a member of the Royal family, and the starship’s queen). The Doctor quickly realises that there’s something a little odd about this starship, in that it doesn’t appear to have an engine. Even in the engine room, the controls turn out to be false.

  Meanwhile, Amy is already displaying all the independence that a modern Doctor’s assistant is expected to have. She accompanies a little girl called Mandy, who has lost her brother to ‘the beast below’ because he wouldn’t follow the advice of the sinister ‘Smilers’, who resemble fairground machines and who guard the ship. Amy discovers a hole covered by a tent that appears to contain a tentacle; she hastily withdraws and finds herself in the hands of the Winders, who take her to a voting booth. Every five years, the residents of the ship are called upon to vote. There she witnesses a video that tells her the truth about the ship: she is offered the choice to protest the result or to forget. Like everyone else, she chooses the latter route.

  The Doctor arrives and chooses the protest option, which plunges him and Amy into the bowels of the ship. There they discover the truth. The ship indeed has no engine, rather it is being supported on the back of a giant star whale, who had come to earth to help the fleeing population at the time of the solar flares. Humanity, however, promptly captured the whale, and had been guiding it by blasting electricity into its brain, brutally torturing the poor animal. Liz 10 is revealed as Queen Elizabeth X, who ordered this act centuries previously; every 10 years, she has her memory wiped so she will forget what she has done. The same happens after her subjects have been allowed to vote – although they are always given a choice.

  The Doctor, distraught, prepares to render the poor whale brain-dead, which will at least put it out of its pain. However, at this point Mandy’s missing brother turns up – because the whale will not harm a child. Amy takes the initiative, and presses the ‘abdicate’ button, thus freeing the whale – which to the surprise of everyone starts to move faster, given that its intentions were entirely benign in the first place. Amy makes a comparison between the whale and the Doctor: both showed up to save the human race.