Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: doctor who

Doctor Who Star Ncuti Gatwa: The Latest Fan Who Became The Doctor

Doctor Who is a rare series in which childhood fans have grown up to become the lead (the Doctor), with Ncuti Gatwa being the latest example.

There's one thing unique about Doctor Who that it shares with Star Trek, which is that the series in modern times has had fans who ended up working in front of and behind the camera. During the 1980s and 1990s, Star Trek: The Next Generation was the only US TV series that had an open door policy for script submissions and launched the career of future showrunner Ronald D. Moore, who went on to become showrunner of Battlestar Galactic, Outlander, and For All Mankind. The one truly unique thing about Doctor Who is that it is the only hit series that has had multiple fans become the lead characters on the show.

The first childhood fan of Doctor Who that became the Doctor was Peter Davison in the 1980s who recalled Patrick Troughton as his favourite Doctor when he watched the series as a child in the 1960s. The first fan to become the Doctor was in the modern era was David Tennant, who grew up a massive geek for the series, starring in fan productions, playing extras and bit parts in Big Finish audios in the 1990s and was very much part of the same 90s fandom that future writers and showrunners like Russell T. Davies, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall were before he was cast as the Tenth Doctor, not from the network, but because he had proven himself as an actor after working with Davies on Casanova. Peter Capaldi was the quintessential uberfan who became the Doctor – he lived and breathed Doctor Who from childhood into early adulthood while having a thriving career as an actor, and he turned the role into one of the ultimate items on his acting Bucket List. Jo Martin is another childhood fan for whom getting cast as The Doctor is a big deal.

Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor who was a childhood fan of the modern era when Doctor Who was revived in 2005 and, as a millennial, spent his childhood watching Tennant and Matt Smith. In fact, his original pitch for his costume when he was offered the role was a modest pitch involving a tweed jacket, which shows how much Smith's Doctor was part of his personal mythology before Davies pitched the idea that he would wear a different cool costume every week.

Ncuti Gatwa Names His Favourite Doctor Who Episodes

"'Blink,'" said Gatwa at a recent press event ahead of his second season of Doctor Who on Disney+. "Let's say I have a blink. Or I really love it; I don't know why. I guess it's my religious upbringing. I really loved when he faced the devil, and the devil took over the Ood and brainwashed the Ood. And like that episode I found so, so brilliant because I feel like it was like this sort of start of like Russell's incorporating fantasy, or like, it was like a slight deviation from sci-fi. It felt like the first episode I watched in that season that was less sci-fi and more mystical."

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