THE DOCTOR’S ASSISTANT
But each assistant had to find her own way into the role. And like Matt, Karen lived in a world where everything was instant and immediate. As soon as the new series started to air, the bloggers would be sharing their views; even before the show began, she couldn’t go anywhere without people noticing. It was all very scary and new.
But it was uncanny how much her experiences mirrored Matt’s. Just as he had had to keep his big secret after being appointed to the role, so Amy, too, was not able to tell the world about this plum role that had landed on her lap. Unlike Matt, though, she couldn’t tell her parents, because she thought the weight of the knowledge would just be too great. ‘My boyfriend knew, but I didn’t tell anyone else, including my mum – she’s a huge Doctor Who fan and I didn’t want to lumber her with the secret,’ Karen said. ‘I only told her an hour before the public found out. I couldn’t tell my mum because she’s such a Whovian. I knew if I told her she was just going to burst with excitement, so I thought a nicer way to do it would be to tell her just before it was publicly announced. It was absolutely agonising! I had my phone in my hand and I really wanted to tell her, because I could tell my immediate family and that was all, but I opted out of that. I think that was for the best.’
As a matter of fact, the role of Amy Pond was not Karen’s first appearance in Doctor Who. That had come in the David Tennant days, when the relevant companion was Catherine Tate, and when Karen appeared as a Roman soothsayer in an episode called ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’. It was becoming something of a tradition for Doctor Who’s companions to have appeared in a previous episode – Freema Agyeman auditioned for several parts, and played the role of Adeola Oshodi in ‘Army of Ghosts’ before she, too, became a companion – and indeed, the series had a regular troop of artistes who would appear more than once. And like the others, Karen’s initial appearance had been very different from the role she was eventually to assume. Indeed, she was unrecognisable. And Karen had very happy memories of her first venture into the show. ‘That was so much fun and just knowing how excited my mum was about that made me think that, definitely, I wasn’t going to tell her about my next role!’ she said.
And the next role, of course, was going to be far more high profile. The fact that Amy had appeared before meant that she had had a very minor insight into what she was getting into. No one had heard of Matt Smith back then (it was 2008) and Karen could not have conceived that she would shortly herself be one of the show’s biggest stars. She was keen to emphasise, however, that that earlier appearance had nothing to do with her getting the role of Amy Pond.
‘But it’s not linked to me getting the companion role in any way because it’s a brand new team for this series,’ she explained. ‘I suppose it couldn’t have hurt to have already been in the Doctor Who environment and to know what was involved, but they are just completely different characters so it requires a completely different approach.’
As time went on, Amy began to experience quite what it was like to be part of the whole Doctor Who set-up. The actors who play Doctor Who himself are warned about what it will be like, but it’s not until they actually experience it that the reality sinks in. The same applies for his assistant, as Karen was beginning to learn. ‘It’s a role like no other,’ she said. ‘When you get involved with Doctor Who, it’s not just filming the show, there’s so much that goes with it. It’s lovely that people are so interested in the show and are really passionate about it. When I first got the role, I was really tempted to go on the internet, but I don’t think that’s the best idea. It’s quite strange to have people forming these opinions of you and they haven’t seen you yet. I thought it was best I ignored all that and just concentrated on the acting.’
Like Matt, she was charged with absolute secrecy about what they would all be getting up to once the show began – and like Matt she couldn’t speak more highly about what was in store. ‘I can’t say too much – because I want you all to watch it – but Steven Moffat has created such a brilliant companion character,’ she told a crowd of journalists. ‘She’s completely relevant to the storyline and she’s a very sassy young lady and certainly very questioning of the Doctor and not in awe of him all the time. She takes him on and gives him a run for his money. There’s an interesting dynamic between Amy and the Doctor, which is due to the way they meet.’
As with all the best companions, especially Rose, Amy was also not going to stand for any nonsense from her companion in the Tardis. ‘The Doctor is definitely an alpha male and Amy is an alpha female, so when they meet, they combust,’ she said. ‘She’s very sassy and feisty and gives the Doctor a run for his money. They have quite a turbulent relationship but it’s also really passionate and they care about each other. I think Amy is quite similar to the Doctor and feels quite alone.’
Karen and Matt, meanwhile, were getting on so well that they were able to tease one another increasingly in public. He had called her completely mad; Karen responded by commenting on something that a lot of people had been commenting on – the shape of Matt’s head. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said. ‘And he has an aura as well. A head and an aura. He has some strange mannerisms but he really doesn’t see it. All those odd things he does with his hands. As you spend more time with Matt you don’t notice it so much and he becomes normal. And that’s how it must be for him. He feels normal. But he isn’t. Which is great for the Doctor.’
This of course spilled into the screen relationship. ‘Sometimes they’re like brother and sister, getting at each other and winding each other up,’ Karen continued. ‘But Amy is also attracted to the Doctor. It’s just that she’s not attracted to him in a romantic way. That’s what separates her from the other companions who came before. She’s not secretly in love with the Doctor. She wants something else.’
The chemistry between them was perfect, and that was a result of the off-screen relationship, too. ‘We just kind of bounce off each other,’ said Karen. ‘The banter that you see on screen – that’s what we’re like all day on set. I sometimes wonder if it’s our way of keeping our energy up between scenes, but it’s all subconscious. And I think we might have been like that if we’d met in any other situation. The one thing I never wanted to do with Amy was to base her on any kind of formula, to conform to what works – or what has worked – in a companion; you know, the whole, likeable, girl-next-door business. Amy is likeable, I hope, but she’s not ordinary. She’s quite complicated and there are layers to explore. So I was taking a few risks with her and I think it works.’
Along with all the attention, Karen was also having to get used to the other, faintly surreal aspects of her new role. For a start, she was beginning to see herself everywhere – not just in photographs but in all the merchandising that went along with every new Doctor Who. ‘The other day I was looking at a version of myself in a new computer game and I asked for the legs to be changed,’ she confided to one interviewer, saying they were ‘almost like a body-builder’s’. Those legs, of course, were becoming famous in their own right, as Amy’s unique calling card.
Karen was also beginning to feel the total immersion that so many have experienced when they started working on the show. ‘We work such long hours that it completely dominates your life,’ she said. ‘I had a few days off once and I didn’t like it when I came back because I felt out of touch. I was out of it for two days and I felt I’d lost Amy. She’s a lot cooler than me. She has a different walk from me. She struts. She’s bad. It saddens me to think of the day when it’ll all be over. But once you’re in Doctor Who you’re in it forever.’ You could say that again.
As interest grew in Karen, attention also focused on her private life. She had a boyfriend, the 24-year-old photographer Patrick Green, who, she said, was perfectly relaxed about her near clinches with the Doctor. The two were snapped out and about, on one occasion at the Bonsai Tree Farm in Suffolk – Bonsai is Patrick’s hobby. He, too, was beginning to learn what it was like to
be involved with such a popular television show, albeit one removed. But from now on, there would be almost as much interest in him as there was in Karen. He certainly seemed able to take it on.
When the debut aired, Patrick returned with Karen to the family home in Inverness to watch the show. The family, of course, were beside themselves. Marie, Karen’s mother, could not have been more proud: ‘It’s absolutely fantastic,’ she said. ‘I’m a Whovian and proud of it. I’ve been a fan for years. From even before Karen got a part in 2008 in the episode “The Fires of Pompeii”. I didn’t even dare dream then that this could ever happen. Now I have to pinch myself to remind me it really is true. She really is Doctor Who’s assistant.’
A further sign of Karen’s popularity came via a website called the Redheaded Goddess Forums, dedicated to the world’s most attractive redheads. Pictures of her surfaced looking a little the worse for wear as she came out of a nightclub; these just made the viewers fancy her even more.
‘She’s quite mesmerizing,’ posted one.
‘She’s pretty cute,’ posted another. ‘She has what I would call a “sweet” face. I reckon babies would smile at her.’
‘Karen’s been an overnight sensation and has become the most popular redhead on the site,’ said a spokesman. ‘I didn’t even know who she was until one of our members posted about her on my forum. The forum received thousands of hits on the Karen Gillan thread, so much so that I thought it was under some kind of hacker attack. There’s a lot of chat on the site about her now and Karen’s star really seems to be rising here. It’s safe to say there’s been a huge following on the site since Doctor Who started. The pictures have helped.’
But she was more than that, too. Karen new that however successful she was in the role, her time on Doctor Who was finite, as it was with everyone, and so she had to plan ahead. And so she had been looking at other avenues to explore, too. Coincidentally, just before she was cast as Amy Pond, Karen landed a role in a low budget film called Outcast, starring James Nesbitt and Kate Dickie, and from the start, it was clear that for the more conservative fans, this role would come as something of a shock.
Despite the fact that Amy was a kissogram with a proclivity for very short skirts and a tendency to make passes at the Doctor, there was still a very wholesome quality about her, something singularly lacking in her role in Outcast. It was a, ‘B-movie mixture of nudity and violence,’ said an insider on the film, adding, ‘The BBC would never have let Karen make it now that she’s famous for being Amy.’ It was to be premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and was also set in Edinburgh, in which Nesbitt chases his ex-lover (on film) Dickie into a council estate where a killer is on the loose. Terror ensues.
It was a very different kind of monster from the ones that Karen spent her time grappling with on the set of Doctor Who. But for however long she was to play the role of Amy, Karen had indubitably made her mark. She, too, was now a part of the long and ongoing history of Doctor Who.
CHAPTER 12
THE DOCTOR AND THE WOMEN
In recent years, it has been a given that the new Doctor who will be a heartthrob. In the earliest days of the programme, the Doctors tended to be more grandfathers than Romeos, but as the Doctors have got younger, so their appeal has increased. And certainly since Christopher Eccleston helped to revive the series in 2005, the new Doctor can be sure of a fair bit of female attention, as David Tennant was to discover. In his case, his fan club certainly contained more than a few adoring women – of all ages, not just teens.
And so it was with Matt Smith. But the actors who play the Doctor have private lives, too. Alongside the adoring fans, Matt had quietly had a series of girlfriends, the first of whom he met in slightly unusual circumstances. When he was told that he’d got the role of the Eleventh Doctor, and was going to have to be prepared to be recognised in supermarkets, he revealed that that was exactly where he’d met his first real love. ‘I haven’t had to cross that bridge yet because I am not as publically recognisable as I will be in a few months so I don’t know exactly what it will be like,’ he said. ‘I hope I will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff if you meet someone at Tesco or whatever. And you never know. I met my first girlfriend at Tesco walking down the meat aisle with my dad. A loving relationship is important and rewarding, and I am a romantic.’
Like any man of his age, Matt had had the odd fling – including one with Billie Piper, if some reports were to be believed, but at the time he learned that he’d got the role, he revealed that he had a girlfriend he’d met in Brazil, but that, ‘It’s a nightmare because she’s 6,000 miles away.’ He wouldn’t say who the lucky girl was, but it wasn’t long before she was named as Mayana Moura, a singer who divided her time between Rio and New York, and who in fact bore an uncanny resemblance to Matt. The two had met when Matt was on holiday in Rio; he’d extended his allotted time there from two weeks to six and they had taken it from there.
‘Mayana and Matt were introduced to each other last January at the fashionable Rio nightspot Club 00,’ said Bruno Astuto, a Brazilian society columnist who knew Mayana in February 2009. ‘Matt went back to England and they kept in touch. He was so in love that he came to Brazil a second time and they started to seriously date. Then Mayana went to England to see him. She has been over three times in all. He was introduced to her family and last month, during his latest visit to Rio, they began talking about marriage. It would be a great match. They have been together for one year. They celebrated on New Year’s Eve when they joined a group of friends for a party in a penthouse overlooking the beach in Copacabana.’
Mayana, a very striking looking woman with green eyes and long flowing hair, was born in Rio on 19 August 1982, and started out as a model after being spotted by the famous photographer Mario Testino. Because of him, she appeared in a magazine fashion shoot under the headline, ‘The New Girl From Ipamena’, and went on to spend some time in Paris, appearing for Karl Lagerfeld in Chanel. She then moved into music and acting, founding a punk band called Glass and Glue with the Brazilian stylist Marina Franco, and getting an agent in the process. But the fact that she, like Matt, was on the brink of a career breakthrough on the other side of the world did not bode well.
‘Matt wants Mayana to move to England but she is really involved in this band project and she does not want to disappoint her band mate Marina,’ said Bruno Astuto. ‘She and Matt are both very young, they are both at the start of brilliant careers and they are in love. I just don’t know how it will end. It is a real dilemma.’
Alas, it was, and one that was not to end happily. A long-distance relationship is difficult enough in itself to maintain, but as soon as it was announced that Matt was to enter the Tardis, not only was attention focused on him in a way that it never had been before, but it meant that his schedule was so busy he hardly had time to think. And so in the summer of 2009 came the first of the reports that they’d split, although it was not properly confirmed until the following year. ‘Matt and Mayana adore each other, but the timing was not right and the relationship just ran its course,’ said a friend. ‘Matt has been up in Cardiff for the past few weeks filming and he will be in Wales for the next four months on a very gruelling shoot. This job means the world to him.’
Initially, it seemed that Matt was planning on devoting all his energy to his new job. After all, it was utterly consuming at times, very long days for months on end, and an opportunity of the kind that comes along once in a lifetime. Work was to be his priority and nothing else. ‘I am afraid I won’t be one of those celebrities falling out of nightclubs with girls on my arm,’ he said, a tad portentously. ‘I don’t have the time. We’re filming seven or eight months of the year. Work is my mistress … Most of the fans I’ve met have been very kind and very generous. But there is one mad one who keeps comparing me to a hedgehog.’
Then there was the minor matter of his co-star. Karen Gillan was an extremely good-looking woman, according to some the Doctor’s sexiest as
sistant ever, not least Matt himself, and it wasn’t unprecedented for a Doctor to have a relationship with a companion. Tom Baker had married one of his, after all. But both were adamant that this was not the case. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend and we’ve been together for four years,’ Karen protested. ‘Matt is a good-looking guy, but he’s like my older brother.’
Matt himself was also keen to dampen that particular line of speculation. ‘She’s a beautiful woman, you know, but we work together,’ he said. ‘That would be an error. She’s my mate, Kaz. I just take the mick out of her everyday. She is as mad as a box of cats – in a brilliant way. We’re both pretty mad, I think.’ And they were both involved with other people. But they were young, attractive and constantly in one another’s company, while on-set romances are a notorious feature of the show business world. It was just that in this case, there was nothing to say.
Of course, a great deal of this occurred because there was speculation about whether this would be the first time that the Doctor (the character, not the actor) was officially romancing his assistant. The series had not yet started to air, but already there were rumours doing the rounds about the scene in which Amy propositions him, making it inevitable that speculation would spill over into real life. Amy was certainly racier than the other assistants: how would to Doctor be able to resist?
‘The truth is, old Doctor Who was an entirely sexless series,’ said Steven Moffat. ‘The Doctor wasn’t the only sexless character among a whole lot of sexually motivated ones. The Brigadier never got a date either, and no one bothered to mention it – neither did Sarah Jane Smith. It was that kind of show, as a lot of shows were in those days. When Doctor Who came back, it had to fit into modern television. The question is: would a young girl hanging out with this older, dangerously attractive, mad, charming, brilliant man, maybe now and then notice? She would. That’s human nature. Are we really supposed to be believe back in the day that Tegan never had a look at the Doctor, even when he was Peter Davison? That Sarah Jane Smith never thought about that charismatic, older Tom Baker as being really not bad? It would happen. You have to address it, and you can’t ignore it. I would say of the old show that there’s always that sort of latent romance going on. It’s never expressed, but when Jon Pertwee says goodbye to Jo Grant, he doesn’t look too pleased about it. He doesn’t look too pleased that she’s run off with someone she haplessly describes as a younger version of him. He’s clearly cheesed off and it’s not the reaction of a proud parent. So the element is there, but as to how we do it this time, that is really centrally and importantly part of the story of this series – so it’s unwise to tell a story before you start.’
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