Doctor Who's Karen Gillan: 'I want to be like Robin Williams'
Karen Gillan talks about Who-mania, what Matt Smith gets up to in her trailer, and where she goes from here
April is the busiest month. Not only are we celebrating a certain royal wedding but for millions of fans the waiting will be over, when the news series of Doctor Who hits our screens next Saturday. The stakes are high for Karen Gillan and the 11th Doctor Who, Matt Smith. Can they repeat the magic of the last series?
With her doll-like features and skyscraper legs, 5ft 10in Gillan is startlingly beautiful in the flesh. She has style, too. At 10am she arrives for our shoot in her own pale lace maxi-dress offset by a black sash, mannish frock-coat and chunky ankle boots. Let me guess… Alberta Ferretti? 'Noo! Noo! Get down to Zara,’ she trills. 'Everyone says I’m really overdressed today but this is significantly easier than putting on jeans and a top, I would just like to point out.’
As for that other glossily maned ingénue teaming up with a constantly regenerating British institution: 'William and Kate? Um, I’m a bit indifferent, really,’ she confesses, then hastily checks herself. 'I guess the country will go into massive celebrations. It’ll be fun and they seem nice.’ She crosses those legs – legs that caused a minor furore when her Doctor Who character, Amy Pond, first appeared, pre-watershed, in a thigh-skimming, kissogram police uniform – before delivering her final verdict: 'I won’t be having a party.’
No commemorative tea towels, then? 'A tea towel? It’s so weird, I find it really weird.’ Surely, with all the Doctor Who merchandise that’s around Gillan can empathise with the royal couple? 'I’ve got a coin with my face on it,’ she concedes. 'It is really bizarre.’
'Bizarre’ is something of a Gillan buzz word, along with 'crazy’ and 'surreal’. It’s understandable when you consider how much the 23-year-old’s life has changed since she landed the role of the feisty Doctor’s companion Amy nearly two years ago. In keeping with the arcane world of Doctor Who, the casting sessions even had their own code-name, Panic Moon, an anagram of 'companion’.
She had modelled and acted before – appearing as a soothsayer in a 2008 episode of Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii, in the medical drama Harley Street and the Channel 4 sketch series The Kevin Bishop Show. But nothing could have prepared her for the onslaught of Who mania.
Last spring was just the start as she and the newly anointed Smith – now 28, and the youngest ever Doctor – kicked off their incumbency by touring schools, emerging from a special Doctor Who bus emblazoned with their image. In July they shared the Albert Hall stage with daleks as hosts of the Doctor Who prom. In August Gillan launched the Amy Pond doll in a Glasgow shopping centre. Does she ever feel like a cross between a Blue Peter presenter and Justin Bieber? 'Ha. It’s like no other acting job because it’s almost sometimes like being a pop star,’ she confirms.
Yet she can’t afford to think about the fans – from children to legions of male admirers – when she’s acting. 'The last thing you want to do when you are about to film a scene is think, “Oh my God, so many people are going to watch this,”’ she says.
And not just Brits. The première of the last series was watched by 1.2 million BBC America viewers. On an early promotional trip to New York Gillan was shocked to see fans queuing around the block to see it. 'People had been camping out and people would dress up as me. We didn’t think anyone knew what it was over there,’ she says.
The new series will air simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. It opens with a double episode filmed in America, which takes the characters from the deserts of Utah to the Oval Office in the late 1960s. The Doctor even wears a stetson. For all its parochial charms – everyone from Ann Widdecombe to Sir Patrick Moore has had cameos – the show is now an international commodity. 'Apparently Spielberg said the world’s a better place with Doctor Who in it.’
This can only be good news for Gillan, who has already dipped a toe in the film world. She recently appeared alongside James Nesbitt in the British horror film Outcast, a role she filmed just two months before getting cast in Doctor Who, and is set to play a New Jersey high school student in a David Baddiel rom-com, Romeo & Brittney, a sci-fi version of Romeo and Juliet.
Yet she comes across more like an excitable student than a global star in the making, whether it’s discussing the joys of vintage shopping, recounting how Billie Piper, one of the Doctor’s previous companions, made the effort to approach her at an awards ceremony, or describing how she and Smith fool around on set. 'Matt has taken to hiding in my trailer and then jumping out and screaming at me, “I’m going to get you!” It’s the scariest thing.’
The pair have a teasing brother-sister relationship. He has likened her gangly physique to that of a praying mantis and nicknamed her Plural Chin for her habit of scoffing sandwiches. She says he has 'a weird head and a weird way of walking’.
Making just one series of Doctor Who means working nine months, 12 hours a day, with only one day off every 11 days, so it’s no wonder they’ve become close. 'You disappear off the face of the earth,’ she says.
The two live in the same apartment block in Cardiff. Evenings are spent learning lines and texting each other. Gillan says she gets just one free hour to herself. 'Me and Matt were talking about this – you have this one hour that you really treasure and we always eat these Nairn’s crackers – they’re amazing. I have this image of us shovelling hummus and oatcakes into our mouths; it happens every night.’
If that sounds a little mundane, she assures me that they do sometimes venture out. Recently, Cardiff music fans were treated to the sight of Smith, Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who plays her on-screen husband Rory, at an Arcade Fire gig. Smith was recognised but Gillan slipped under the radar. 'I didn’t have any trouble. I was dancing away,’ she says, gleefully.
Gillan has been with her real-life boyfriend, the photographer Patrick Green, for five years, but is careful to keep this side of her life private. You won’t see them falling out of nightclubs, though they were once photographed by paparazzi, buying a Bonsai tree in a Suffolk garden centre. 'What’s strange is that my boyfriend’s from Ipswich so they were following him and I just happened to turn up, so that was really… bizarre,’ she says.
Her taste in music veers from the poptastic (the Spice Girls and Britney Spears) to the classic (Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, American gospel), the latter influenced by her father, John, a care worker and a regular singer at pub open-mic nights. Her mother, Marie, a housewife, doesn’t do performing in any way, she adds, sounding relieved.
Gillan may appear happy-go-lucky but she clearly has Irn Bru in her veins. Growing up in Inverness, an only child, she had musical ambitions, but was cripplingly shy. 'I was one of those weird children that just couldn’t talk to people, so I kind of had to make myself be not like that because I knew it was going to hinder me.
I was going on stage trying to sing but couldn’t get anything out. My voice was quivering but I knew that I just had to keep on doing it because you only get scared of stuff that you don’t know; you’ve just got to familiarise yourself with it and then it's fine.’
By 16 she had conquered her fears sufficiently to play Liesl in a school production of The Sound of Music ('Cringe!’ is her verdict today). She headed to drama school in Edinburgh, and then moved to London to attend the Italia Conti stage school. Three months later a part came up in the Scottish detective drama Rebus – to take it up she had to drop out of school. 'I was 18, I couldn’t resist the temptation but it was only one episode so I was taking a gamble.’ What happened next? 'Nothing happened,’ she says, with a cackle. 'It was terrible.’
On the plus side, she got a job in a south London pub, where she perfected the art of drawing a clover in a pint of Guinness. This foray into civilian life was to prove short-lived. Scouted by a model agency, she walked the catwalk for Allegra Hicks. 'I have to wear size five shoes for heels to stay on but they’d always be a size seven so I’d be stuffing tissue in.’
Assessing her modelling career, which included a stint promoting a make-up range, Gillan becomes uncharacteristically subdued. 'I didn’t really care that much,’ she admits. I just wanted to earn some cash so I could subsidise myself to live in London and go to acting auditions.’ A friend of hers lives in a model apartment, where girls sleep two bunk beds to each bedroom. 'When it’s fashion week the local models are told, “Get out of the apartment, we’ve got some girls coming over from Russia who have nowhere to stay.” It’s a harsh world unless you’re some kind of supermodel.’
One can imagine Gillan joining the ranks of Emma Watson, with her lucrative modelling contracts for Burberry and Lancôme, or Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively, the face of Chanel’s Mademoiselle handbags, but this is not in the game plan. 'That would never come if you’re not doing good work, so you’ve just got to focus on doing good work,’ she says.
I ask if there’s an actor whose career she particularly admires. Her answer is refreshingly offbeat. 'Robin Williams. I want a career like his! I want to be like Robin Williams, really. It’s all the different characters he does, all the different voices.’ What about actresses? 'You know whose career I really liked? Brittany Murphy. I thought she played quite interesting characters. She was in Girl Interrupted, and in 8 Mile she had this griminess to her, this edge, which I quite liked.’
Is Gillan yearning for edgier roles? Compared to Doctors, companions can have short shelf-lives – there have even been hints that Amy Pond is to be killed off, as a mid-series cliffhanger. She says she would like to do theatre, either contemporary 'or something really bizarre like Eugène Ionesco’.
Matt Smith recently veered off-piste to play Christopher Isherwood in a BBC Two drama, to much acclaim. Gillan will shortly play Jean Shrimpton for the BBC Four film We’ll Take Manhattan about the 1960s style icon’s first encounter with David Bailey, at a Vogue photo-shoot in New York. Miniskirts and it-girls? It’s not very Robin Williams, but if anyone can pull it off Karen Gillan can. Those character parts may have to wait.
The new series of Doctor Who starts on BBC One on Saturday, 23 April
okay, A pretty long read. But still quite interesting...
Greg
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