Matt Smith--The Biography

by Emily Herbert

  The fact that he was going down so well in the United States helped. ‘Matt will help broaden the show’s appeal away from sci-fi geeks and little kids and attract more girl fans,’ said a source at the BBC. ‘At present the show is seen only on BBC America but we’re hopeful that it will be picked up by one of the major networks. We are confident the Doctor Who brand can become a £100m business within the next few years.’

  Doctor Who merchandise was, it should be said, nothing new. It dated right back to the very beginning of the series: in 1964 there was a board game called Dodge the Daleks, and the following year there were another three, called The Dalek Oracle, Dalek Shooting Game and Daleks: The Great Escape. Since then there had been board games, card games, role-playing games, miniature war games, pinball and computer games. There had been picture cards, action figures, money banks, key rings, Tardis-shaped clocks, Sonic Screwdriver pens, a Dalek USB Flash Memory Stick and even stamps. Then there were Doctor Who books, magazines and comic books. There were Doctor Who medals made by the Royal Mint. There was everything you could possibly want.

  Some Doctor Who memorabilia had even become collectable. Action figures from the 1970s could net a great deal: Tom Baker figures started at about $75, but rare figures could go for a great deal more. In May 2006, a Denys Fisher Dalek with its box sold for $1150. Bonhams once held a sale of Doctor Who memorabilia: it raised £250,000. It was possible to buy life size Daleks from about £1,895, while older models could go for as much as £36,000. A Cyberman could fetch £9,600. The stakes were high.

  The last David Tennant series did spectacularly well. According to BBC Worldwide, it was sold to over 50 territories, sold more than 3.3 million DVDs, more than seven million action figures and about 300,000 books in 2009 alone. And that’s not counting Dalek masks, Cybermen masks, pencil cases and folders, thought to be worth about another £10 million.

  In fact, a whole industry had built up around the series. ‘Despite the recession we’ve gone from strength to strength,’ said Alexandra Looseley-Saul, who runs The Who Shop in East London. ‘In hard times people escape to nostalgia and fantasy. One of our hottest items is a replica of David Tennant’s brown trench coat which we sell for £350.’

  Then there was Ian Clarke, who made Doctor Who memorabilia to order, for The Planet Earth, including Daleks and Tardises. ‘They are the ultimate toy – and people find them impressive,’ he said. ‘They are very popular with celebrities. Harry Hill and Liam from The Prodigy both bought one. One couple bought a Tardis as a changing room for their swimming pool and someone else bought another one to use as a shower room.’

  And so, with Matt as the new Doctor, the new merchandising machine went into action. After the series began, the first three episodes were released on DVD, selling more than 13,000 in the first week. In April, three hardback Doctor Who novels were published: all made it into the Top 10. ‘ASDA took them as Book of the Month for teens, which has never been done before, and was such a success they’re planning the same for the next release,’ said a source at the BBC.

  Meanwhile, Doctor Who Adventures Magazine had relaunched, with a new website; there was a console video game by Nintendo in the offing, Character Options, which licenced the toys, was producing a new set of figures and a new Sonic Screwdriver had hit the market. There were plans for a Doctor Who Arena tour in the autumn, interactive PC and Mac games and a range of Penguin books. ‘If Doctor Who were sold tomorrow, it would be worth about £100million and as the earnings continue to grow, Matt will make more and more money,’ said a source.

  When David Tennant was the Doctor, more than 20 types of action figures based on him went up for sale. Matt could expect something similar, and it was also a gauge of his popularity to see how fast the shops were selling out. And they were: the first model, still in David Tennant’s torn clothing rather than the tweed jacket and bow tie he would make his own, sold out almost immediately. Matt’s bemused mother Lynne was impressed: ‘The likeness is incredible,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing, I think it’s a really good model of him. And he’s my son, so I’ve obviously looked at it really closely. It was fabulous to see his first model, it was really exciting for us all.’ The official sale price was £8.99 but the models were already trading on eBay for £20 to £30.

  The interest just could not be overestimated. There was a Doctor Who Collectors Wiki, untold numbers of fansites and a seemingly insatiable appetite for Doctor Who products from all over the world.

  Matters had now also got to a state where Matt needed an assistant of his own. Enter Lynne, who decided to give up work to help run the affairs of her increasingly famous son. ‘With all the Doctor Who stuff, Matt really needed somebody to run his fan club, so I thought what better than to keep it in the family, because nobody else is going to do it like me,’ she said. ‘I think everybody who writes in should get an autograph, because he needs his fans. And already, we’ve had loads of stuff coming in. From the day he was first announced as the new Doctor, people have been writing to him from all over the world. We’ve had stuff come from Australia where somebody sent him a T-shirt with a Matt Smith logo on it and he’s had hundreds of Christmas cards, birthday cards, all sorts of things.’ And it was bound to go on in leaps and bounds from there.

  And so yet another industry began to grow up: that around Matt himself. The predictions that he might end up as the wealthiest Doctor boded well for his future, whatever the turn his actual career went on to take, for in one sense, at least, he was set up for life. Matt was now an established, property owning actor, with a great career in front of him and, if he played his cards right, a considerable amount of money in the bank. He was being given that which actors value above all else – choice. Matt was already well on the way to being able to pick and choose his roles, with little to hold him back from joining the ranks of the greats. All he needed now was sound judgement – and not to lose his nerve.

  Although all sorts of glory beckoned Matt at such a very young age, there was still one danger: that the role of Doctor Who would overshadow anything else he would ever do in his career. The very fact he was so young was an element in his favour, because it gave him plenty of time to seek out other projects, but none the less, it was something he had to be aware of. Even Christopher Eccleston, the shortest-ever serving Doctor, could not get away from the role: just after Matt’s first series ended, Eccleston featured on a one-off film about John Lennon, in the title role. Even then, he was spoken of as a past Who. And Matt had certainly made an impact in the role: he was up for Best Actor at the TV Choice Awards, while Karen was up for Best Actress and the show itself for Best Family Drama. It was the first time the Doctor and his assistant had made the same shortlist.

  Matt, of course, was well aware that there were some hard choices to make somewhere along the line. A similarly iconic role to the Doctor was that of James Bond, which would be up for grabs at some point in the future, but he saw himself as the bad gut in that one, not the good. ‘I don’t think I’m handsome enough,’ he said of the James Bond role. ‘I think I’d make a quite good, young Bond villain. It would be kind of nice though to be the actor who’s done both. I’ve never got away with being the handsome leading man. I suppose I’m the peculiar, odd lead. Which may work in my favour.’

  That certainly applied to his role as the Doctor: a sort of but not quite romantic hero. ‘The Doctor’s a bit bumbly, isn’t he? He doesn’t really know what to do with women,’ he said. ‘People ask me “Who do you think your Doctor is?” and I’m reluctant to think of it in those terms, because it’s still a work in progress. Steven Moffat, who’s just the most brilliant writer, told me when I first met him that the interesting thing, the defining thing, about the Doctor is that he never quite knows what’s going to come out of his mouth in any given situation. His thoughts just combust spontaneously. I’ve tried to harness that brain-to-mouth rapidity. I mean, you could think about it for ever but how do you play the most charismatic man in the universe? It’s a real challenge.
If you play him consciously charismatic, he instantly loses the charisma.

  ‘Of course, really charismatic people don’t have to do a thing. They just are. I’m still finding my way on that one, but I like to think it gives me something creative to play with. Hopefully we see him in the white heat of danger, flying by the seat of his pants. He’s also funny and he has great courage and this enormous intellect, but all the great Doctors have had that. As a character, he kind of belongs to everyone. Everyone has their own identity for him. Mine is probably different, but I’ve become a real fan. I know it sounds very vain, but I do look forward to the ceremony of watching the show on a Saturday night.’

  The James Bond connection was an intriguing one, however, and Matt had, coincidentally, signed up to work with an actress who was already associated with 007. Just before he got the part of Doctor Who, he signed up to star in a film called Womb, alongside the previous Bond girl Eva Green, a film, according to the producers that, ‘tells the story of a grieving widow, played by Green, who decides to clone her late husband.’ It was, ‘a story about the efforts to overcome death by genetic manipulation.’

  The script was written by Benedek Fliegraf. According to the production team, ‘it deals with the moral and ethical issues surrounding human cloning, but in a sensitive and all too believable story. It inexorably draws us in to the world of the characters, so that we can identify on an intimate personal level with the human dilemmas that confront them. It should be a profoundly moving film that will deeply effect audiences, and stir debate about this issue.’

  In fact. Womb could not have been more different from the role of Doctor Who. A German production, it was a story about a young woman, played by Eva, who returned to her grandfather’s home on the North Sea of Germany, and who is reunited with her childhood sweetheart, only to see him die in a car accident. She resorts to cloning to bring him back to life. She played Rebecca and Matt was Thomas.

  The decision to cast Matt in the role came about precisely because he didn’t look like James Bond. ’Matt is quite extraordinary because he’s an actor who works from the gut rather than the brain,’ said Fliegauf. ‘He’s really connected with real life somehow, whereas Eva looks one time like Disney’s Snow White and then like an actress from a Murnau film. She has no connection with the real world whereas Matt’s feet are firmly on the ground. I didn’t want to choose the classical beauty for the male lead because then it would have been rather weird if she made the decision to clone him because of the physical aspect. It’s more about the soul.’

  The film, which took just over a month to make, was set around Hallig Langeness, Sylt and St Peter-Ording. ‘It took a while to find the locations because the setting for the film is not specific. It’s somewhere in the North by the sea,’ said Paul. ‘Womb is a modern fairy tale in the style of, say, [19th century writer] ETA Hoffmann — it’s set in our world but given a fictional twist.’

  Filming was a mixed experience for Matt. On the one hand Eva was widely held to be one of the most beautiful women in the world; on the other the whole experience had been downright painful. ‘We were on the north German coast and the script called for me to run into the Baltic without any clothes on,’ he related. ‘In the middle of bloody winter, mind. Oh my God, how freezing was that? It was the coldest I’d ever been and, of course, it just so happened to be my first scene with Eva. I had to get out of the water and do the whole thing in front of her stark bollock naked. That’s not a good lot for any man, let me tell you.’

  A very different role was as Christopher, in Christopher And His Kind, about the writer Christopher Isherwood. It was a film written by Kevin Elyot for the BBC and reunited Matt with his That Face co-star Lindsay Duncan, again playing his mother, again a domineering and suffocating character, but this time one he managed to escape. Christopher leaves Britain for Berlin in the 1930s, which was indeed a seminal point in Isherwood’s career, for it was there that he wrote the Berlin stories that were eventually going to inspire the musical and film Cabaret. Other characters in the drama were Jean Ross (Imogen Poots), an aspiring actress who was to be the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret, Gerald Hamilton (Toby Jones), a funny little man later immortalised in Mr Norris Changes Trains, the poet W.H. Auden (Pip Carter) and Heinz (Douglas Booth), a street cleaner with whom Christopher falls in love. For Isherwood was, of course, a gay man – a world removed from the Doctor, and indeed, from the character in Womb. Matt was clearly picking as many diverse roles as he could in order to avoid the typecasting pitfalls that lay ahead.

  There was, inevitably, a certain amount of controversy surrounding it all. The film was shot in Belfast, rather than Berlin, and eyebrows were raised when the Nazi flag was hung in the courtyard of Belfast city hall. Then there was to be a gay snog with Douglas Booth (who had also played the title role in a film about Boy George), which would have pleased Russell T Davies, if nothing else, since he had brought in the slightly bisexual, but probably more gay than anything else, Captain Jack Harkness.

  Matt brought innovation to the role, not least because, in The Lodger, there had appeared to be a nude scene, a first for the Doctor. Matt was pictured in the shower, his modesty protected by a shower curtain, before flinging himself out of the bathroom, grabbing a towel en route. Delighted fans claimed that they had seen parts of the Doctor never pictured on the small screen before; the BBC was adamant, however, that nothing unseemly had taken place. Matt was wearing some form of cover-up, it was said. Still, it was undoubtedly taking the Doctor into areas he had never ventured in to before. Could there ultimately be romance on the cards? It had been hinted at enough in this series, but everyone was agreed that there was too much of a danger of spoiling the dramatic tension. And anyway, Amy had finally got married. She and the Doctor looked destined to remain just good friends.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE BEST DOCTOR EVER?

  Matt’s first series of Doctor Who was an absolute triumph. He garnered ecstatic reviews, so much so that some reviewers were hailing him as the best Doctor ever, while Karen was receiving similar praise as the best ever assistant. Certainly, the chemistry between them positively sizzled, and as Karen herself remarked, Amy was more sidekick than assistant. ‘I do think she is different from previous companions of the Doctor because she’s very equal to him,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t take his word as gospel and she’s always happy to challenge him. If he tells her to do something then she won’t necessarily do it. She might go off and do her own thing, which can sometimes create a rift between the two of them. They are best pals though and it’s a very up and down relationship because they are both very passionate people. The Doctor is definitely an alpha male and Amy is an alpha female, so when they meet, they combust. They have quite a turbulent relationship but it’s also really passionate and they care about each other. Amy can really hold her own against him. It’s a great relationship.’

  As interest in all matters Who-related continued to escalate, a Doctor Who Live tour set off in stadiums around the country, complete with Nigel Planer as an ‘inter galactic showman’, lots of monsters and video footage of Matt as the Doctor; Matt himself appeared at the premiere to ecstatic applause from the crowd. ‘It has been months since Doctor Who was on our screens but those pining for a fix have some salvation at hand – the nationwide tour of Doctor Who Live, which kicked off at Wembley last night,’ wrote Virginia Blackburn in the Daily Express. ‘There they all were, singing and dancing across the stage, assorted hordes of Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Vampires of Venice, Judoon and the great exterminators themselves. Can Daleks fly? They did last night. This was Doctor Who as arena show, a beauty parade of not very beautiful creatures held together by something resembling a plot.’ The plot was slight, but the audience loved it – especially when a Dalek flew over their heads.

  Speculation about a Doctor Who film reemerged, but this time with Matt taking the lead role. The man himself was keen. ‘I’d definitely be up for staying on if they did a film – hell yeah,
’ he said. ‘I would be thrilled if there could be a movie version – I want them to do it. There is something brilliantly televisual about Doctor Who but I think it could definitely work as a film.’ Meanwhile, the spin-offs continued – The Sarah Jane Adventures had started, with Matt guesting as the Doctor. In real life, he was now an Alister, with appearances at Sir Elton John’s Winter Ball.

  Another triumph was the Christmas 2010 Doctor Who special, with a tale about the Doctor having to persuade a Scrooge-like character played by Sir Michael Gambon to save his own soul. The show was described as ‘Dickens meets Jaws’ – ‘Well, the baseline of Doctor Who is about a man who lives in a telephone box and saves the universe in a bow tie, so you have to go some to up that,’ explained Steven Moffat. ‘So if you’re going to do a Christmas special for Christmas Day, based on the fact that the audience have had a selection box for breakfast, and are probably drunk, you have to move it on a bit. Actually, a normal episode of Doctor Who wouldn’t be enough at that point.’

  Katherine Jenkins also starred in the special and it is a measure of how much a part of the British psyche that Doctor Who had become, that she confessed it had terrified her. ‘My heart was almost thumping out of my chest,’ she said. ‘It was a bit like turning up on the set on the first day, which was pretty nerve wracking, too. It was amazing but very frightening. You know, I’m nervous when I cannot speak. I’m the chattiest person going, but I spent the entire day on set being very quiet. But I shouldn’t have worried because everyone in the Doctor Who family made me so welcome. They made me feel that it was something that I could do.’

  For Matt, it was the culmination of an immensely successful year. Just 12 months previously he had been watching David Tennant in the role; now he had triumphantly claimed the crown for himself. He was also dealing with fame very well. ‘That side of the job is only as drastic as you make it,’ he said. ‘Of course the kids come up to you, and they’re honest and frank. I love it.’