Skip to main content

Ncuti Gatwa is Doctor Who!


It is official! I was wondering when the announcement was going to come; with just one episode left for Jodie Whittaker, it was getting late, and there was no way the modern media would let that alone be the reveal for her successor. But here it is, on Mothers’ Day the news dropped.
Ncuti Gatwa is going to be the Fourteenth Doctor! He will headline Doctor Who going into 2023 under the stewardship of Russell T. Davies, back in the showrunner job for the first time in thirteen years. He will become the latest face of one of the grandest sci-fi media franchises in the world. And so it begs the question, who is he?
Unlike the last two Doctors, both of whom had fairly significant resumes under their belt in film and television, Gatwa is a less-established entity, on par perhaps with Matt Smith when he was first cast. Although unlike Smith, Gatwa does have at least some kind of profile off of the Netflix coming-of-age series Sex Education, on which he plays Eric, the best friend of Asa Butterfield’s lead character. And in fact he’s been nominated at the BAFTAs and several other British Awards outlets for this role. It makes me curious to see the show, get an idea of his performance strengths.
Gatwa is one of the youngest actors to take on the role of the Doctor -just a little older than Smith and about the same age as Peter Davison when he first played the part in 1981. In fact he’s the same age as me, which is probably going to be a little jarring at first. Nothing at all wrong with that, though I do miss the days when mid-aged actors could play the part and the Doctor didn’t necessarily have to be a sex symbol (I am aware Peter Capaldi was just two Doctors ago). Because one thing’s for sure off of those pictures that have been circulating by the press reporting this: Gatwa will be a very sexy Doctor.
But most importantly, most inevitably, Gatwa is the first black Doctor -at least the first that really counts as the lead of the show, with all due respect to Jo Martin and her enigmatic “Fugitive Doctor”. There was almost no way the Fourteenth Doctor wasn’t going to be a person of colour. After breaking the gender barrier in 2017, the show needed to break the racial one too -affirm that the Doctor really can be anyone. I would imagine the response isn’t going to be as toxic this time around (although I’m prepared to be surprised); the Doctor changing race doesn’t seem as contentious an idea in this community as changing sex -that pushback against Whittaker is still pretty visceral and malignant in the fandom. But it’d be naive to think Gatwa is going to have an easy time of it. If his attitude in red carpet interviews on the day of the announcement is anything to go by though, he is up to the challenge and I wish him the best of luck.
A new face for Doctor Who is always exciting, perhaps even more so when it’s someone so fresh and unexpected. I can’t wait to see what his costume looks like, what his TARDIS will look like, and what he will bring to the show in a run already full of anticipation due to the return of Davies. Until then we still have Jodie Whittaker’s swansong later this year to wrap things up and set the stage.
Next year is Doctor Who’s sixtieth anniversary. I’m pumped for whatever Davies has planned around that. And it’s ample time to regenerate the show with a new face unlike any the series has had. Ncuti Gatwa will not only be joining, but reshaping that legacy. It’ll be a thrill to see!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

A Stylish and Charmingly Reinvented David Copperfield

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account)  is the most important book Charles Dickens ever wrote. It is not the most famous or influential by any means (that would of course be A Christmas Carol ), but it is the book that is the purest expression of the authors’ style, identity, and worldview. It is his most personal work, semi-autobiographical in its story of the chronology from infancy to adulthood of a character who overcomes great loss and hardships to find a fulfilling life as a writer. To read David Copperfield  is to understand Dickens himself. Armando Iannucci knew this when he decided to make a new adaptation of the novel for a twenty-first century audience. He also knew that Dickens adaptations are ubiquitous at this point. Films are a bit rarer, but every few years a new television adaptation rears its head to keep the authors’ unique world an...
Post a Comment
Read more