Did you know that Billie Piper (Rose on Doctor Who) used to be a pop star? Her experience with fame helped David Tennant adjust.
Doctor Who’s 2005 reboot came as a pleasant and very unexpected surprise for longtime fans and newbies alike, becoming a hit that continues even to this day. Not even the cast and crew anticipated such a positive response.
Billie Piper, who played the beloved companion Rose Tyler, was there at the very start. She and David Tennent, who played the Tenth Doctor, talked about the unexpected challenges of those early days on a new episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast With…
One of those challenges was the sudden notoriety pretty much everyone involved with the series immediately had. Tennant found it a shock to the system, but Piper was able to help, since it wasn’t her first rodeo. For those of you who, like me, didn’t know, Piper was a teenaged pop star in the late ’90s. She went right to the top of the charts at the age of 15, so she’d been here before.
Piper’s experience with this world came in handy for Tennant when he realized being on Doctor Who was going to change his life forever. No longer could blend into a crowd and be anonymous. He had made it, and it was scary:
"I’ve often said in the intervening 15 years that entering into that madness… and particularly that loss of anonymity, which I had not really experienced before… because I had you to go on that journey with, I think I survived it much better than I might have done. You knew what it was to lose that layer of skin. It was very helpful to be on that journey with someone who understood what it was."
Since the two of them left Doctor Who, life has continued to be full of surprises, successes and failures. But they can always look back together at the experience that changed both of their lives.
All I can say is that I’m relieved Piper was there to guide Tennant’s through unfamiliar territory, because it likely gave him the confidence to keep going and give us some of the best Doctor Who episodes every made!
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h/t RadioTimes