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Jodie Whittaker says she will struggle to match one part of David Tennant’s Doctor Who performance

Jodie Whittaker says she will struggle to match one part of David Tennant’s Doctor Who performance

The new Thirteenth Doctor takes her hat off to one of her predecessors – and it’s all about his voice

Huw Fullerton

Published: Saturday, 29 September 2018 at 8:00 am

David Tennant looms large in modern Doctor Who, with the Scottish actor’s romantic, cheerful Doctor a firm favourite among many fans.

New Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker certainly counts herself among those supporters, and says that the last few months of filming in particular have given her a new appreciation for Tennant’s performance.

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Why? Well, she says she's impressed that Tennant was able to deliver every line of technobabble and keep up with the masses of dialogue all while simultaneously not working in his native accent.

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“I love working on dialect,” Whittaker, who plays the Doctor with her own Yorkshire accent, told the crowd at a screening of her first Doctor Who episode The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

“But with this kind of vocabulary and this amount of lines every evening, I take my hat off to David [Tennant], who transformed his voice as well as doing a phenomenal Doctor.”

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In her previous role on ITV's Broadchurch, Whittaker proved that she is perfectly capable of working in an accent different from her own, but the actor explain that new showrunner Chris Chibnall wanted her to perform on Doctor Who in her natural voice.

However, she was quick to point out that this doesn’t exactly mean the Doctor is from Yorkshire...

“It’s certainly not a Yorkshire character,” she explained.

“It’s a body with a voice, and that voice is mine. I think that if I was RP [received pronunciation] or came from London and had chosen to have a Yorkshire accent, it would have a real meaning behind it in a way.

“But it doesn’t in this instance because it’s me.”

Doctor Who returns to BBC1 on Sunday 7th October at 6.45pm

Authors

Radio Times commissioning editor Huw Fullerton. He sits in front of a shelving unit, looking at the camera and smiling. He wears glasses and has a moustache

Huw FullertonCommissioning editor

Huw Fullerton is a commissioning editor for Radio Times magazine handling comedy, entertainment and specialist drama. In a previous regeneration, he covered all things sci-fi and fantasy for RadioTimes.com.

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