Two years ago, Jodie Whittaker told me she was considering doing comedy. Before Doctor Who, she had played countless roles that required her to be “on the brink of trauma”: a whistleblowing nurse in Trust Me, a grieving mother in Broadchurch, the wife of a jealous husband in Black Mirror. We were speaking in 2021, a few weeks after she’d filmed her last scenes as the Doctor. Doctor Who had a bit of everything, but she’d never done pure comedy before. Maybe it was time to try something different.
Now it’s 2023 and Whittaker is back on our screens. She is now starring in Time as Orla, a mother-of-three imprisoned, harshly, for “fiddling the leccy”, who finds herself stuck in a spiralling nightmare as her life falls apart in the system. And soon she will appear as Tess in One Night, a dream-like Australian drama about sexual assault, memory and trauma. After watching both series back-to-back, it’s fair to say neither is a barrel of laughs. “Oh, yeah,” she chortles. “I really took my own note and ran with that one.”
Whittaker is at home in London, sitting in front of her “scruffy sofa”, short bleached hair tucked away under a beanie. She is a great and effusive talker. Ask her a question and she’ll dance around it for ages, taking multiple detours, via stories about people-watching, hugging, her best mates from home, what she was like in lockdown, and how much she loves rules. She’ll get to an answer, eventually. “To get back to 20 minutes ago…” she says, at one point; she is quite extraordinary at keeping track. She talks about her good luck often. Actors often say that they’re lucky and it can be a luvvie affectation, but with Whittaker, you get the sense she’s genuinely thrilled to be doing a job she loves, mostly because it means she gets to spend time with a lot of people, and she also really loves people. “Being sociable is my dream scenario,” she says, happily.
The 13th Doctor’s extended farewell aired over nine months, which made it seem as if she’d never been away. But Whittaker did take time off, to have a baby (she’s married and has two kids, but doesn’t talk about her family publicly). “I was at home for a year, sitting on my lazy ass, but it looked like I was really busy, saving some universe,” she says. When she was filming those last scenes of Doctor Who, she was in the early stages of pregnancy, though nobody knew about it yet. She went on Graham Norton and told him that she was drinking water because she was delicate after the wrap party, but really, “I had morning sickness that avoided mornings. It was an all-day event.”
It meant that, for a brief moment, she was the first ever pregnant Doctor. “The first Doctor with two hearts,” she says. [The Doctor, famously, is an alien with two hearts.] “I was able to tell a kid at Comic-Con that I was method for the first time. All these people being like, you’re not qualified, as a woman, to play an alien. First time you’ve had a Doctor with two hearts, so there you go!”
The massive profile of Doctor Who meant that once her maternity leave was over, for the first time in a long time, Whittaker was being approached about roles rather than having to audition for them. She knew she wanted to be part of an ensemble and she wanted to do something convenient, because she had a small baby and one child at school. “I’d been away for such a long time doing Doctor Who [it mostly filmed in Cardiff] and it was an absolute pleasure, but I didn’t live in the same city as my family for quite a bit of it. So I thought, I need to do something really practical. And then I read One Night.”
One Night is an Australian drama, with a largely Australian cast, shot in Sydney and around New South Wales. Moving the whole family to the other side of the world for five months was as far from practical as it was possible to get. But Whittaker read the script “in the weeds of the night, and at 2am, I got to the end of it, and thought, I need to play this role. What can we do?”
Whittaker is Tess, a corporate high-flyer who has recently returned to her small coastal home town, near Sydney, after 20 years in London. She left in the aftermath of a trauma, the bones of which are raked up again when one of her childhood best friends, Simone, writes a thinly disguised novel about a friend who has been raped. As in any small town, secrets are rarely far from the surface and Tess finds herself facing a past that she doesn’t remember, through the blurry memories of those who do. It’s a complex story that builds towards a devastating conclusion, and along with the rest of the cast, Whittaker had to act her socks off.
“For me, it felt a very unique point of view,” she says. “We’ve all seen shows that are based around trauma and sexual assault, but always looking in and seeing it from afar and going, right, this is the person, we’re investigating it, how do we work it out? Whereas this is the internal survival, the trauma of one event, on many people.” It is particularly strong on friendship and enduring, complicated teenage bonds. “My best mates are my best mates, through the shit and the shine. We’re still going from childhood,” she says. “We’re lucky that we haven’t experienced this horrific trauma, but I thought it was magically written from someone who understood those kinds of relationships.”
She did her homework. “When you play a part, sometimes you want all the answers for someone and you want to know, how, why, what. What does that feel like, when the major event of your life hasn’t got a memory attached to it? For so many people, that is their reality.” She read victim-impact statements and made sure she was prepared. “And I am one of the lucky ones, I don’t know what it is like to experience [sexual assault]. But unfortunately, in your extended circle, we’re not all a world away from it.” She admits she is more nervous than she’d usually be, to be talking about work. “Because I’m so proud of it and I really hope people see it. You don’t want to let your side down, because one controversial sentence and I could fuck it,” she explains. With Doctor Who, she was nervous that somebody would bring up an episode she hadn’t seen and she’d have to wing it. This was quite different.
If it were a British show, she doesn’t think she would have been asked to play the cool, closed Tess at all. “In real life, I’m super over-tactile, a massive over-sharer, and completely chaotic. Tess contains everything, is physically and emotionally at arm’s length, and gives nothing away. How the fuck am I going to do that?”
She did have to do an Australian accent. “I thought I was going to smash it, because I have a false sense of confidence about these things. I suppose the only way to describe it is as if…” She does a comedy, broad Yorkshire voice. “If someone was like, ‘Eee bah gum, I’m from oop naarth.’ I was like, this is an Australian accent, I’ve heard it on television, here I am!” It turned out to be a bit harder than she thought. “It’s a pretty huge fucking place, there’s a lot of dialects. I’m sure to a trained ear there will be a lot of mistakes, but I’m putting that down to Tess having lived in England for 20 years.”
She has appeared in plenty of dramas with “very heightened emotional storylines”, as she puts it, in the past. Is she able to shake that off when she goes home? “Between scenes, I am very much this,” she says, gesturing towards herself. I think she means gregarious, extroverted, “quite hyperactive”. “I’d go home, go back to tea and bath-time, and I always felt like I didn’t carry it.” Then, when she was in Doctor Who, she started to realise she might have been carrying it, after all. “I bounced around for three and a half years. I was living my best life, never been so full of beans. I felt 10!” In Broadchurch, she’d spent five months playing a grieving mother. “I’m very aware I’m lucky, this isn’t real and it didn’t happen to me. I do have some experience of some things in life that touch on grief, but I’m not the mother of that scenario. But if you do spend five months in that, it’s taken me until I’m 41 to realise that it does stay with you.”
She finished shooting One Night in Australia, had five days off and went straight into filming Time. “You just become a bit of a whirlwind. It probably makes me an absolute nightmare to live with.” The first series of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama won awards by the bucketload (this time it was co-written with Helen Black). When she got the gig, everyone wanted to know what Stephen Graham and Sean Bean were like. “They’re not in a women’s prison, are they?” she jokes, sorry to let them down.
There were questions, too, at home. “My little one asked me if I was playing a goodie or a baddie, because it was set in prison. I love the simplicity of that. Obviously, I said it in a totally different way, but in my grownup version of articulating it, what I loved about Time was that we challenge the labels.” She is wary of calling it a political show, but then again, “You can’t take politics out of it. If you’re going to tell stories in real time, it involves politics, in my opinion.” Again, she’s done her homework. “I think for Orla particularly, the strain on the system is very apparent. We read about it all the time. Putting someone in prison for six months when they’re not a danger to society, and that’s cost however many thousands of pounds… They’re in for six, but they get three, and in three months, your life is obliterated.”
Orla is from Huddersfield; Whittaker grew up in Skelmanthorpe, a village just outside the town. The first time she ever went on the Graham Norton Show, she explained why the locals were known as “shats” (short for ‘shatterers’), in front of a baffled-looking Lady Gaga, Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. “Can you imagine? Literally walking on, and you’re like, ‘Hello!’ It was a great night, that, though.” Clearly, she didn’t need any dialect sessions for Time. “Bella [Ramsey, her Time castmate] didn’t know I were northern. I think they thought I was RP.” She knows that her accent is often part of the conversation, though less so since she used it in Doctor Who. “And I’m not bothered. I love my accent. If I didn’t like it, I’d have lost it. But I’ve toned lots of it down, surprisingly to other people. When I did Orla, I had to unlearn the 20 years in London.”
Whittaker had known she wanted to be an actor since she was very young. Did it always seem possible? “Yeah. Because I was really lucky, I was brought up in a household that didn’t consider dreams a fantasy,” she says. There’s that luck again. “Dude, I am. I’ve done enough research, I’ve played enough parts, I’ve read enough scripts to know, I’ve been brought up in a very happy household. And that’s not the hand that everyone’s dealt.”
Her parents took her to the Alhambra theatre in Bradford to see “all the shows” and and she was exposed to cinema from an early age. When she was 15, her careers adviser at school told her that acting wasn’t a proper job, but when she told her parents what was said, they were angry. “Having your parents be furious at that is a very lucky thing. But I have to say, this is not someone who could have been a lawyer. It’s not like, ‘I want to be an actor, but I could be a CEO!’” she laughs. “This is my skillset. I am not academic in any way, I have a massive ego, and the lessons I was good at were few and far between.”
She has been working all year. Recently, she was papped shooting a new Jack Thorne drama for Netflix, but when I mention it, she uncharacteristically clams up: she can’t talk about it yet, in solidarity with the ongoing actors’ strikes in the US. She doesn’t know what she’s doing after that. Doctor Who mapped out her life for four years, so now, she quite likes not knowing. Besides, she doesn’t want to jinx anything. She knocks on wood, just in case.
Whittaker loves a rule. That’s why she loves learning accents: there are rules, things that are right and wrong, clear parameters. “I find it a bit like choreography,” she says. “Give me a rule and I’ll stick to it.” She has a few rules for herself, too. One is to be present and to stay in the moment. And there are two more. “Try not to be an arsehole,” she says. “And try not to be shit.” Both, it has to be said, decent rules to live by.
• This article was amended on 13 November 2023 because an earlier version referred to Whittaker being taken to see films at the Alhambra, Bradford, whereas that venue is a theatre. The reference has been changed to her seeing “shows” there.
Fashion editor Jo Jones; hair and makeup by Nohelia Reyes using Lisa Eldridge and Dyson supersonic hairdryer; styling assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistants Nick Graham and Carissa Harrod; shot at Mernier Venues.
One Night will be available exclusively on Paramount+ from 24 November
