As the Ninth Doctor, Christofer Eccleston played a hugely important role in kicking off the revival of Doctor Who in 2005, but he only played the role for one season. Why did he leave so early? He explained this past weekend to a crowd at New York Comic Con, per The Independent.
“I left [Doctor Who] only because of those three individuals and the way they were running the show,” he said in New York. “I loved playing the character. I felt I was going to play the Doctor my way and I wasn’t going to get involved with those politics and that wasn’t workable, so off I went. I became the Invisible Man.”
He didn’t divulge fans with the names of the individuals he’s referring to, but using the process of elimination, most Doctor Who fans could figure it out — it’s probably then-showrunner Russell T. Davies and executive producers Julie Gardner and Phil Collinson.
According to Cinema Blend, things got pretty messy when BBC breached Eccleston’s contract and released the news of Eccleston’s departure before consulting with him, something they admitted to after the fact. Awkward.
So things ended badly. The BBC still reached out to Eccleston about returning a years later for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode that had Matt Smith and David Tennant in it, but Eccleston turned them down.
"I personally didn’t feel like the narrative was strong enough, particularly for the Ninth Doctor because I’d taken quite a lot of abuse in my own country when I left. As the show was being celebrated I was being abused in the press and that was hard to take and very confusing. So I looked at it and I thought is this really the way I want to come back and I decided it wasn’t. There were other factors, political factors."
All of this took a toll on Eccleston’s confidence as an actor, not helped by him being blacklisted from certain shows during the fallout. Also, while he was filming Doctor Who, Eccleston battling anorexia, something he talks about in great detail in his book, “I Love the Bones of You: My Father and the Making of Me“.
"The illness is still there raging within me as the Doctor. People love the way I look in that series, but I was very ill. The reward for that illness was the part. And therein lies the perpetuation of the whole sorry situation."
Still, Eccleston did come out the other end of this experience to land roles in shows like The Leftovers. Still, it helps to remember that actors on our screens still struggle with their own issues after the camera is turned off.
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Of course we wish Eccleston had remained in the role a little longer, but his role in Doctor Who history is more than secure.
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