David Tennant
David Tennant
David Tennantis a Scottish actor known for his roles as the Tenth Doctor in the British television series Doctor Who, Alec Hardy in Broadchurch, Giacomo Casanova in the TV serial Casanova, Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, and Barty Crouch, Jr. in the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. In addition to his appearances on screen, he has worked as a voice actor and in theatre, including a critically acclaimed stage production of Hamlet. In January 2015, Tennant received the...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth18 April 1971
CityBathgate, Scotland
We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.
It has to be said that the bad guys are often more interesting than the good guys because you get to indulge part of your nature that hopefully gets subsumed most of the time. But I just like playing interesting characters, and variety's the spice of that, as it is with life, I suppose.
If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. I think it's part of trying to find what makes a character.
An accent, obviously, it's to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you, I think.
I always like seeing people transforming themselves in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that.
There's a morality... I think there's a moral compass but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins... I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.
I remember a conversation with my parents about who the people on the TV were, and learning they were actors and they acted out this story and just thinking that was the most fantastic notion, and that's what I want to do. And I remember understanding very clearly the difference between the fantasy and reality of that, and that making it even more exciting.
The Doctor' is the kind of character - because the guest cast is changing all the time, there are very few constants in the show, so the 'Doctor'- when you're there, you're in it a lot. You're speaking a lot.
When you're older, you want to be scared because you understand more where the boundaries between fantasy and reality are, and I suppose they are more blurred the younger you are.
Animation is a fascinating area from an acting point of view because it's not really like anything else because you are only providing a portion of the performance. That's very inspiring and it forces you to do things in a different way - to tell stories through your voice.
You know, I've just about got used to the fact that people in Britain know who I am on some level, but the notion that there's any kind of international recognition is still slightly bizarre to me.
The bad guys probably get the better lines, don't they? And they wear less spandex. That would be quite good.
To me, it feels like 'The Doctor' has to have a long coat, and that's something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there's something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn't quite fit.
The gritty indie films are a lot rarer than the films that aspire to fill multiplexes.