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The actress made history battling aliens as the 13th Doctor – now she’s taking on a more elusive enemy: the patriarchy
Jodie Whittaker bounds into a back room at the Trafalgar Theatre, on Whitehall – where, for the next two months, she’ll be playing the Duchess of Malfi – in scruffy hoodie, skinny jeans and trainers, her hair sticking up in three erratic bunches. “I interviewed for the role of the Duchess dressed just like this,” she says, grinning broadly. “I could see [the producers] eyeing me, but I was like, ‘Yeah… just wait till you see what I can do.’ When it’s a part I really want, I can be very convincing.” She grins again. “I’m basically a bit of a bully.”
The eponymous role in John Webster’s four-centuries-old gore-fest is one of the most demanding in theatre – the Duchess is terrorised and then tortured by her two brothers after she marries for the second time, in secret – and Zinnie Harris’s electrifying modern adaptation (which Harris also directs) doesn’t hold back. What possessed the former Doctor Who star, not seen on stage since she played Antigone at the National Theatre in 2012 (with the exception of a single night in the Royal Court’s Echo this July), to take on the challenge?
“There was always a reason for me not to do another play,” she says, citing television work and family commitments (she has two children with her husband, actor Christian Contreras). “But then 12 years go by and you realise there are all these muscles you are not using. And when I got sent Harris’s script, I thought, ‘What the f— is this?’ It addresses slut-shaming, the silencing of women, violence, coercive behaviour, the way powerful women instil fear in some people. All these things that are played out in the news every day.”
Whittaker’s Duchess suffers at the hands of her sweatily lecherous Cardinal brother, played with malign relish by Motherland’s Paul Ready. In one scene, graphic images, appearing to show her husband and son being tortured, are projected onto the wall. When I tell her I found it almost unbearable to watch, she shrugs, “Well, we’re not showing anything that doesn’t take place somewhere, for somebody.”
Whittaker didn’t audition for The Duchess (of Malfi), as Harris’s adaptation is styled. At 42, she is now in the position, she admits a little sheepishly, of being “invited in” to chat with the producers – one upshot of her groundbreaking stint as the 13th Doctor. The general consensus on her tenure as the Time Lord, which encompassed three series and several specials between 2017 and 2022, is that while her performance was typically gutsy, she was ill-served by the scripts. Whittaker, however, has only fond memories of her experiences on the show. “I’m never going to get tired of talking about it, because it was the best gig ever,” she says now. “There are always going to be opinions in the show that you don’t agree with, but to be a part of the Doctor Who family is such a beautiful thing.”
There was consternation in some quarters when Whittaker’s casting was announced, making her the first woman to be given the role. Former Doctor Peter Davison weighed in to say the casting made him feel “a bit sad”, since the male Doctor had always struck him as a good role model for young boys. Whittaker is not easily fazed, but this suggestion staggered her. “I’m fascinated with this idea that women are a genre,” she says. “We’re not. We’re just the other half of the population. The fact that things can still be seen in these terms – a female book, a female Doctor – amazes me. And the suggestion that I wasn’t qualified to play an alien on account of being a woman amused me greatly,” she says, acknowledging the fact that, as every good Whovian knows, the Doctor hails from the distant planet of Gallifrey. “You’d think the thing that wouldn’t qualify me was not being an alien.”
After her Doctor regenerated into David Tennant, she thought she might want to try some comedy; she’d preceded Doctor Who by playing the grieving mother Beth Latimer in all three series of Broadchurch, with gut-wrenching intensity. Instead, she found herself playing two more women in extreme states of distress: first, a victim of sexual assault in the Australian television drama One Night; then, last year, an impoverished single mother jailed for fiddling her electricity meter in Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time. “The amount of s— I learnt doing both these shows – about women who, in court, often have to prove their life choices didn’t contribute to what happened to them.
“Around the time Time was broadcast, Suella Braverman made that comment about homelessness being ‘a lifestyle choice’,” she adds, referring to a social-media post in November last year in which the then home secretary defended her plan to restrict the use of tents by rough sleepers on Britain’s streets. “I mean, come on! So I feel a real need to get behind these sorts of stories. I must be a very rageful human being.” She pauses for a second. “On the other hand, I’m just an actor. I didn’t write these shows. And I’m not a politician.”
Whittaker played the Doctor in her natural Huddersfield accent; she was raised a few miles from the West Yorkshire town, in the village of Skelmanthorpe, where her parents ran a local business. For the Duchess, she speaks in RP instead. “It was more fitting,” she says. “People attach so much to accents in terms of their perception of class and identity and all these things. We have an obsession with class in this country. Someone could sit the two of us in a room and decide just from the way we sound what our upbringing was. And they would probably be wrong. I, for instance, had a very nice upbringing, thank you very much.”
Be that as it may, Whittaker has never been cast in the kind of posh English role that has come to define some of her female peers – her friend Michelle Dockery, with whom she studied acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the early Noughties, for instance, remains best known for playing Lady Mary in Downton Abbey. Whittaker gives a cackle of laughter. “Have you met Michelle? She’s not anything like Downton!” (Dockery, the daughter of a lorry driver and a care-home assistant, grew up in Romford, Essex.) “But, yeah, I’m no English rose. I know what I am.”
Whittaker is used to people getting things wrong about her. When she made her big-screen breakthrough, playing a rebellious teenager opposite Peter O’Toole in Roger Michell’s 2007 film Venus, “People would say to Roger, ‘She’s a rough diamond! Wherever did you find her?’ I think they thought he’d discovered me in a supermarket queue having an argument with my boyfriend. And I’d think, ‘Actually, I’m classically trained.’ I’ve sat in audition rooms and practically begged people to give me a part, knowing they think I’m not right. I like to explore roles that are a world away from my reality; that’s my job. I never want to just be this girl from Huddersfield.”
Even as a child, Whittaker only ever wanted to be an actor. At school, she says, “I was never the top in class, never the top at sports, never anything like that.” Perhaps because of this, she feels an almost pathological need to prove herself in every role she takes on. “When I think I can’t do something, it’s like a red rag to a bull.” After she graduated from the Guildhall in 2005, her career took off fast: she made her professional debut that year at Shakespeare’s Globe and was then cast almost immediately as Jessie in Venus, with whom O’Toole’s character, an elderly actor, nurtures an ambiguous friendship.
“I was straight out of drama school and very naive,” she says. “The first thing I said to Peter was, ‘Lawrence of Arabia, that was well long.’ But we got on like a house on fire. To be on set with that generation of actors, some of whom are no longer around, was very special.” (The cast also included Vanessa Redgrave, Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths.) “You don’t often see people on film at that stage in their life. Although we would probably be wary now of telling that sort of story about an older man and a younger woman. I wonder if we would tell it differently now.”
Acting alongside O’Toole, who earned his eighth and final Oscar nomination for his performance, taught her some valuable lessons. “I assumed that when you get that old and famous, you can cut corners,” she tells me. “But I looked at his script and I’ve never seen so many notes. I realised that you never stop working. During filming, he broke his hip. Within a week, he was back on set. That work ethic has set me up for life. Also, not to objectify him, he was absolutely beautiful.”
In a recent interview, the Call the Midwife actress Jessica Raine grumbled that “nearly every actress you see now” has had cosmetic work done to their face. Has Whittaker ever felt that pressure? “Why does it even matter?” she says. “I’m not saying anything against Jessica – and she’s probably right, I’m not an idiot – but if a friend of mine had Botox, I couldn’t give a s—. As it happens, I’m allergic even to moisturiser. If I had work done, it would be like polishing a turd. But for some people, that sort of thing makes them feel good. What makes me feel good is having two glasses of wine.”
However, she adds, “If I stopped working and someone said to me, the reason you’re not working is because of [the way your ageing face looks], I don’t know how I’d respond. But I’m not making a political statement. As an actress, you are expected to have an opinion that represents every woman. I can’t do that.”
Whittaker is a blast, a fireball of effusive energy. She’ll next be seen in Toxic Town, Jack Thorne’s new drama for Netflix about the Corby toxic-waste case, which in 2009 led to a landmark ruling that established a link between atmospheric toxic waste and birth defects. After that, who knows? You get the feeling she really could do anything. “I’m often cast as the suffering woman the audience needs to get behind,” she says. “I’ve got a bit of a sad-times face. But I’d like to explore the idea of injustice from the side of those perpetuating it. I’d like to do something really dark. Because that’s another thing people get wrong about me: that that might not be the sort of role I think I can do.”
The Duchess (of Malfi) is at the Trafalgar Theatre, London SW1 (atgtickets.com), until Dec 20
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