David Tennant almost didn’t portray one of his most iconic roles to date.
The actor shared on a recent episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast with… that his former agent actually told him, “Don’t touch” the role of the Doctor in the BBC hit show Doctor Who.
His wife, Georgia Tennant, who took over hosting duties on the latest podcast episode, recalled how David initially got asked to star as the titular character, saying he met Doctor Who executive producers Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner while working on the 2005 miniseries Casanova, which Davies and Gardner also exec produced.
Georgia said they were looking for someone to take over the role of the Doctor from Christopher Eccleston in their 2005 Doctor Who revival, and decided to “lure” the Broadchurch actor to their house to watch some of the first season.
“And then they go, ‘Guess what? Do you want to play [the Doctor]?’” she recounted. “And you pretend to think about it for like a day or something?”
“It was longer than that,” David responded, before his wife added that he was “clearly” going to take the part.
“Well, maybe I was clearly going to do it,” the Jessica Jones actor admitted, “but there was definitely a moment where I wasn’t.”
David continued, “About 40 hours after they asked me, and I sort of had to process everything that it meant. And I had an agent at the time who was like, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s not going to work.’ Not my current agent. A previous brilliant agent who’s since retired, but she didn’t call that correctly, as it turns out. She said, ‘It’s not been on yet, it’s not going to work. You don’t want that hung around your neck.’”
And his former agent was definitely wrong, as his Doctor Who character has become one of his notable roles. David ultimately played the Tenth Doctor for three seasons from 2005 to 2010 before reprising his role as the Fourteenth Doctor in 2023 for the 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials.