Asked at The Woman Who Fell To Earth launch by a journalist from The Yorkshire Post what specific Northern qualities we can expect to see in her Doctor, Jodie Whittaker warned, “The Yorkshire Post is not going to like my answer!”
“The thing is, I came to the audition and most of the time in the script, like with Broadchurch, there’s the accent required, but for this I had no idea. So I turned up and I said ‘Chris [Chibnall], you said it was okay to use my own voice, did you really mean it?’ and then we did the auditions and throughout that entire process it never felt wrong.”
Whittaker’s Doctor, however, is “certainly not a Yorkshire character,” she explained. “It’s a body with a voice and that voice is mine. I think if I was RP [Received Pronunciation] or if I was from London and I’d chosen to do a Yorkshire accent, it it would have a meaning behind it in a way that it doesn’t in this instance because it’s me.”
She takes her hat off to her Broadchurch co-star David Tennant, she went on, “who transformed his voice as well as doing a phenomenal Doctor because it requires an extra thing, but I was lucky I could just use what I’ve been given.”
David Tennant was one of the people who learned about Whittaker having been cast in the role a couple of days before the news was made public.
“I had wonderful conversations with Peter, Matt and David,” she recalled. “I can’t quite remember them because I was so hyper and anxious.”
“The things they said were, it’s going to go so quick and it’s a journey like no other and you’re going to love it. I can’t believe we are watching that because it feels like yesterday we were [performing a spoiler-y stunt]!”
The Woman Who Fell To Earth airs on Sunday the 7th of October on BBC One.