Karen Gillan is sitting opposite me at the Soho Hotel, jet-lagged, makeup-free, her long red hair wet before a styling session, talking about cancel culture.
Specifically, she’s talking about Douglas is Cancelled, a four-part ITV satirical drama in which the 34-year-old Scot plays Madeline Crow, the co-host of a 6pm TV news show alongside older housewives’ favourite Douglas Bellowes (Hugh Bonneville), whose reptation nosedives when rumours of a sexist gaffe start to snowball online.
Gillan says the ice-cool, complex Madeline is “far removed from me as a frantic, nervy person”. She’s also miles away from Gillan’s most recognisable roles as feisty companion Amy Pond to Matt Smith’s Dr Who; the bald, blue cyborg Nebula in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers movies; and Ruby Roundhouse in the Jumanji films.
But the ITV show reunites her with her Doctor Who writer/showrunner Stephen Moffatt, and co-star Alex Kingston, who plays Douglas’s tabloid-editor wife.
“Steven wrote this as a play years ago, before The Morning Show or that film Bombshell,” she says, referring to the prominent dramas exploring the #MeToo backlash against sexism and abuse in TV. “I asked if I could read it, thought ‘this needs to be seen’, and went on a long campaign to get Stephen to make it into a film, just badgering him.”
When Moffatt finally told her it was being made for TV and asked her to fly back from LA, where she’s lived since 2013, to play Madeline she was scared – the idea genuinely seems not to have occurred to her – but said yes immediately. “Because it’s only become more relevant.”
Indeed. Douglas’s potential downfall echoes that of Philip Scofield and Huw Edwards, and there’s a grim flashback scene in Moffatt’s script between a younger Madeline and powerful producer Toby (Ben Miles) that echoes several testimonials against Harvey Weinstein.
The show is also funny, with lots of Moffattian zingers: Madeline tells Douglas that in their partnership “one of us is hot and one of us is intelligent, and unfortunately for you, they’re both me”.
A central point is how the tabloids’ ability to destroy a career has been accelerated by the witch hunts and pile-ons of social media. “We are definitely seeing individuals and institutions being called out for things that aren’t right,” Gillan says. “However, I do think when people pile onto an individual without knowing all the facts – and we are all guilty of doing this – that can be really damaging.
“I don’t think we’ve figured out how to leave room for redemption yet, depending on the severity of what someone has done. Obviously there are some things people should remain cancelled for, but some things where it would be good if they could have a second chance and show that they have learned from it and changed their behaviour. I think we should find space to allow that.”
She says she has never personally been harassed, patronised or put into compromising situations in her career “but I know way too many people that have been”.
Does she think things have got better, or rolled back, since the explosion of anger that was #MeToo? “I believe in positive reinforcement, you know, and I do see some changes being made,” she says.
“I see a concerted effort to create a safer environment for people to work in. We have the introduction of intimacy coordinators. I've seen firsthand the effort the industry is making to hire more female filmmakers.
“But obviously, there's a lot that needs to be done. There's a small percentage of the population who are always going to be abusers of power. So what we need to do is really examine the systems we have in place that are still currently allowing people like that to get into positions of power.”
I’ve met Gillan briefly once before, at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards in 2011, after she’d made her only UK stage appearance so far in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar, a year after Doctor Who made her a star and a nerd’s favourite.
She was charming and unaffected then and still seems so today. A tendency to talk fast is the only clue to the aforementioned frantic nerviness.
She has suffered from anxiety for years and learned that the best way to cope was “accepting it into my life as a part of me and being okay about being anxious. The best strategy is doing the thing that scares you, the thing your body's screaming at you not to do. It’s a version of exposure therapy, basically, where you just expose yourself to [the scary thing] enough times until your brain realises that you're not going to die.”
Deep down I reckon she’s a tough cookie. She doesn’t hesitate to defend her beloved Doctor Who against reactionaries who decried the casting of a woman (Jodie Whittaker) and then a queer black man (Ncuti Gatwa) as the Time Lord:
“That’s just ridiculous. We need to see progression and change in everything, and their casting was so exciting.” She weighs in on the narrowing of opportunities for working class people in the arts. “You don’t even hear regional accents [among actors] now,” she says. “It’s so annoying to see the arts become just for the elite.” She’s established a scholarship programme at her local drama school in Scotland to help people from backgrounds similar to her own into the business.
Gillan’s father worked in a care home for people with learning disabilities, her mother in Tesco, but they gave unconditional support to their only daughter when she decided in her teens that – despite being incredibly shy – she wanted to act.
After training in Edinburgh and at Italia Conti she had a brief, unsatisfying stint as a model, mostly in student shows, before scoring telly bit parts that led to Doctor Who in 2010. In 2013 she was given a three-year work permit in the US to shoot the horror film Oculus, and when it wrapped she stayed.
Later that year she was cast as Nebula and submitted to having her head shaved without a second thought. “Because I’m 5’11” people thought I was a man,” she smiles. “Either that or they felt pity for me.” A bloke solicitously complimented her on her dancing in a nightclub when she was bald: later she realised he assumed she was undergoing chemotherapy or suffered from alopecia.
Having previously been “unable to look after myself” and living off junk food, she suddenly had to look and fight like a superhero. “Miraculously, at 25, I was forced to eat well and work out for the first time in my life.” Now both habits are second nature.
Nebula was “supposed to die at the end of the first film, I was only booked for eight days, and I was terrified I was going to be fired”, but the role has now been a mainstay of Gillan’s career for six films and 10 years. “The gift that keeps on giving,” she smiles.
There have been plenty of other big and small screen roles along the way, plus a new string to her bow. In 2015 she wrote and directed two shorts film, Coward and Conventional, then in 2016 wrote, directed and starred in a Scottish indie feature, The Party’s Just Beginning, about a girl in Inverness drowning memories of a friend’s suicide in substance abuse and bad sex. It’s good: you can find it on Prime Video.
Acting-wise, Gillan says she wants to “do more stage work, exercise the parts of myself as an actor I haven’t gotten to yet, and dive into the dramatic space more – I’m scratching that itch with Douglas is Cancelled”. But in her downtime she’s constantly coming up with film and TV pitches – “my superpower is ideas” – often in collaboration with her husband, writer and comedian Nick Kocher.
“It’s such a modern love story: we met through Instagram,” she says. “He popped up on my ‘recommended friends’ list, so I stalked him on YouTube because I needed to see his demeanour – you know, he might have had a weird voice or something – and then I slid into his DMs.”
She scowls. “I need to let people know that’s the first time I’ve ever done that.” They had a lavish but under-the-radar wedding in Scotland in 2022, where Steven Moffat made a speech.
Writing with her husband is easy, she says: but his attempts to teach her to drive have provoked “full on arguments, but it’s just something I’ve got to do. Everybody drives in LA. And there are movies where they have to shoot around me ‘cause I can’t walk to a car and drive away.”
Given her track record, I’m pretty sure she’ll ace the test if she sets her mind to it.
