It’s interesting times for Doctor Who fans. Later this year, David Tennant will return to the show, becoming the first actor to play two iterations of the Doctor: the Tenth and the Fourteenth. He’ll stick around for a few specials before actor Ncuti Gatwa takes over on a more permanent basis sometime in 2024.
The public at large learned that Gatwa would be taking over the role in May, but he knew for a while before that. And he didn’t keep the information completely under wraps, as he revealed during an interview with Rolling Stone. According to Gatwa, he ran into Matt Smith — who played the Eleventh Doctor back in the early 2010s — at a party. Drinks were imbibed, and Gatwa tipsily told Smith that “I’m following in your footsteps.”
To be fair, Gatwa didn’t literally say “I’m playing the next Doctor”; reportedly, Smith was confused by the remark until the BBC made the official announcement, whereupon we imagine that he went “ooooooh” to himself, prompting whoever was in the room with him at the time to ask what he was looking at on his phone.
Ncuti Gatwa will play the Doctor for at least two seasons
Smith can tell Gatwa all about it on the Doctor Who group chat, which Tennant set up for Gatwa so he could get advice from former actors who had played the role. After all, no one else knows what the experience is like.
As for how long Gatwa will have that experience, he hinted that he’ll be behind the wheel of the TARDIS for at least two years. “It kept me warm and it held me all night, even if I was broke,” he said of the kind of theater work he did before landing the gig on Doctor Who. “I’m planning on getting back to it next year, after I finish season two of Doctor Who.”
Granted, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t play the Doctor for longer, but it sounds like he’s locked in for two seasons at least.
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