Behind the curtain with Jodie Whittaker

Her decaf oat latte hasn’t even arrived but joyous Jodie Whittaker – an actor used to keeping galaxy-spanning, planet-shaking, time-quaking secrets – is already telling me one.   

“Over there,” she says, pointing out of the bar window at The Standard, London to the gothic spires of another hotel, “is where I celebrated getting Doctor Who.” 

It was 2017 and the Yorkshire-born, now-42-year-old was busy in Scotland, filming BBC medical drama Trust Me. But she’d been summoned to London for a ‘recall’ for the part of the 13th Doctor, arguably the most beloved – and indisputably longest-running – sci-fi character in British television history. So, on a Saturday, her only day off from shooting, she express-trained back to her adoptive home city for what she thought was another audition… only to be told the part was hers. 

For the first woman to play The Doctor, for British culture in general, this was A Moment. “I went with my agent and sat in the St Pancras Hotel bar and had a pink drink! Pink Champagne or summat!” she says, accent largely undimmed even after 22 years Down South. The few people she told, and could tell for several long months, included her husband and her mum. “I sent my mum a photo of me like this,” Whittaker explains, pulling the first of multiple goofy, amazed faces that this brilliantly goofy, continually amazed and reliably amazing actor will pull – alongside various silly voices – over the course of our interview. “And she’s got it on the wall at home as you walk in!”   

Then, drink drained, “I had to get the train straight back to Scotland”, body and brain fizzing with both Champagne and the knowledge that her career and life were about to change in myriad unimaginable and frankly bonkers ways. “Only good ways,” Whittaker clarifies, beaming.   

I’d seen those “good ways” in action three days previously. Whittaker was performing at the Royal Court as one of 15 actors to each take a one-night turn in ECHO, Berlin-based Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s meditation on exile, displacement and our position in the world. Like her fellow actors (who included Fiona Shaw, Toby Jones and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning), Whittaker received no script in advance. Instead, her lines and movements were dictated on the spot by Soleimanpour, beaming in via laptop and feeding her words into an earpiece. 

It was a different kind of risk to playing a family-friendly time-traveller, especially after building a career in quality, often hard-hitting British TV – notably child-murder saga Broadchurch (2013-2017), prison drama Time (2023) and the upcoming Toxic Town, about the real-life poisoning of the unborn children of Corby, Northamptonshire by industrial waste. Not unreasonably Whittaker was, as she told the expectant sold-out ECHO crowd at the top of show, “Bricking it!” Cue roars of laughter and an immediate sense that we were all in this rollercoaster together. (Side note to any producers reading: please send this effortlessly funny woman a comedy script, asap.) 

“It required nothing of me except to be totally present,” she reflects of her reason for taking ECHO. “Theatre is the most live thing anyway. And if you’re going to be in an environment of exposure, that's an amazing one – but with everyone onside.” 

At the stage door was a queue of some 50 ‘Whovians’, all clutching pieces of Doctor Who memorabilia, their ardour as aflame as ever, two years after Whittaker handed over the TARDIS keys to Ncuti Gatwa. How daunting is that fandom?

“I've only ever had positive encounters with Doctor Who fans, because they love something that is the happiest time of my life. It’d be really hard if you did a job that you're going to be the most known for in your career, and you’re miserable. I’ve had the polar opposite experience,” she says. “The fact that it has this life outside of me, I have no issue with. I had mates waiting downstairs, so I was like, ‘I’ll sign one thing each!’ Otherwise you’ve got loads to sign. And I’ve got a long name and I spell the whole thing!” 

She has 11 weeks of stage-door interactions ahead of her. Twelve years after her last run on the London stage, in a National Theatre production of Antigone, she’s back, in the title role in The Duchess. It’s writer-director Zinnie Harris’s updated adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi.

When we meet, Whittaker hasn’t even begun rehearsals, “but I'm very excited and passionate about it”. It’s an enthusiasm matched by Harris. “Like Jodie, ‘the Duchess’ is witty and magnetic – she has a charisma that makes you laugh and draws you in,” says the playwright. “But she also has this fierce strength. The Duchess is a story of a woman who stands up to the controlling and toxic men in her life, and carries on with her life, her love and her children regardless. I can’t think of a more perfect fit. Jodie is a superb stage actress, a woman very much at the top of her powers: captivating, magnetic and ultimately no nonsense.” 

Whittaker showers Harris’s adaptation with similar credit. “The minute I started reading it, although it’s definitely a classic piece, I felt like I knew everyone. What I loved about it – which is very similar to what I loved about Antigone – is that in classical drama, we have this very heightened experience. You can take that to the max. This can be incredibly naturalistic, or this could be absolute melodrama. And it can dance between both. I can’t wait to be thrown into that patriarchy and see that control that the men have over her. The way Zinnie has done it, it doesn’t sound like it was written in the 1600s, which is very appealing, because it’s very accessible to me.”

Whittaker is returning to the West End at a time when London theatre has rarely been more vibrant. From new works by established playwrights to blockbuster IP adaptations, to visiting Hollywood royalty, it’s a boom time on the boards. But that 12-year absence wasn’t by design. Broadchurch took up almost four years of her life, Doctor Who the same. “So you’ve gone over seven years on two jobs. And, as we know, now we’re at an age where life goes like that,” she says, snapping her fingers, “and you can’t quite believe it!” Another reason, then, to take the plunge – alongside a burning desire to use the gifts she’s worked hard for. 

“I went to drama school,” she says of her time at London’s Guildhall, from which she graduated in 2005 with the prestigious Gold Medal for Acting. “And I got into a lot of debt to have that classical training. To not use it made no sense. Because why would I cut out an entire part of my love of this world in this industry?” 

Toxic Town, written by Jack Thorne and streaming on Netflix in 2025, was another passion project. As a story of real-life injustice, about a community battling for the truth about high incidences of birth defects, this deeply empathetic woman who’s a self-confessed “over-feeler” felt compelled to help tell it. But she counsels caution – audiences shouldn’t assume she’s a working-class warrior.   

“I don’t think of roles in a class sense,” she says firmly, not least because “there’s a presumption, because of the way I sound, immediately everyone says: ‘You’re working class!’ But I was brought up in a very middle-class environment,” Whittaker says of her village childhood outside Huddersfield where the family window business meant a comfortable upbringing. “My mum and dad are incredibly working class, but we went to Florida on holiday, and I got a car on my 17th birthday.” Consequently, “I do not ever want to misrepresent myself”. But she recognises that “I find roles that maybe tap into politics. The female perspective. The class system. Injustice. All of those things probably come with being a bloody lefty who lives in London,” she acknowledges with a smile. “But I really am fired up by it.” 

Her heritage might be, as she put it on stage at the Royal Court, “nine hundred years Yorkshire”. But two decades into her southern exile, Jodie Whittaker is equally fired up by London. What it gives her, personally and professionally, and what it promises, too. “You can go to see a play that has been done for hundreds of years. But that doesn’t mean that the brand-new playwright, the young playwright, the debuts don’t have equal value. This city provides so many different spaces to work. 

“So, yeah, I’m clinging on! I won’t move! I really love it.” There is, too, a security offered by a thrusting capital city that encompasses the best of British. “If, like me, you’ve got a very short attention span in London – particularly in the industry that I’m in – you can be who you want to be, as manic or probably quite exhausting as I am,” concludes this irrepressible, energising-not-exhausting actor. “I don’t ever feel like an oddball in this environment.” 

Whittaker is appearing in The Duchess [of Malfi] at the Trafalgar Theatre from 5 October to 20 December 2024 

The hippest hotel stay in London

In 1999, The Standard launched in Hollywood, quickly becoming the hangout spot for A-listers. Fast forward 20 years, and the launch of The Standard, London has followed in its LA ancestor’s footsteps (Drake even threw an after-party here that lasted three days). With its 1970s aesthetic and prime location a hop from King’s Cross station, the hotel is a bright Brutalist beauty on the outside and a groovy masterpiece on the inside, thanks to designer-in-residence Harris Reed. Enjoy a buzzy DJ line-up and playful cocktails at Sweeties, casual hangs in the Double Standard and The Library Lounge, or an alfresco moment in Isla. But the ultimate draw is Decimo, where Michelin-starred chef Peter Sanchez-Iglesias serves Mexican tapas backdropped by the magic of a London skyline. And with the hotel celebrating its fifth anniversary in London this year, there’s never been a better time to check in.

Art direction Jamie McPherson
Production Matt Richardson-Wood
Hair Ben Cooke
Makeup Tahira
Photography assistants Tom Frimley, Joe Smith
Digi tech Henry Jackson
Styling assistant Tejashree Raul
Retouch Studio RM

With thanks to the The Standard, London