After Years In The TARDIS, Doctor Who’s Peter Capaldi Is Reclaiming His Time

Now, the veteran Scottish actor is relishing the opportunity to revel in the one thing he, somewhat ironically, never had enough of during his years in the TARDIS: time.

“I’m just really enjoying taking some time and having cups of coffee and playing guitar and just relaxing,” Capaldi says of his new schedule. “Doctor Who was very busy, and very tense, and to stop doing that was lovely, to reconnect with myself again.”

Not that he’s been idle; despite handing over the mantle of The Doctor to Jodie Whittaker at the end of last year’s Christmas special, Capaldi is still an active presence on the international convention circuit. Having recently knocked over an outing at Baltimore’s Regeneration Who event, he’s about to touch down in Australia for this month’s Supanova Comic-Con & Gaming shindigs in Melbourne and the Gold Coast.

With a bit of distance between himself and the gruff-but-caring space dad he came to be for so many people around the world over the past half-decade, Capaldi speaks of his experience as one of thirteen (well, fourteen, if you want to get technical) actors to embody one of the world’s most recognisable protagonists on screen with well-earned wisdom an enduring fondness.

“I loved it; It was great,” he reflects. “It was a wonderful experience, a great privilege to be in that role.

“It takes over your life; you sort of don’t realise – until you finish it, you don’t realise how much it’s taken out of you. You’re constantly on call with it, not just in terms of the actual acting of the specific episodes but in just fulfilling the role and fulfilling people’s expectations in life as well, because you’re constantly meeting people who are fans of the show or who want to meet The Doctor. And you’re constantly selling it, because it’s a big brand that is worldwide, so you have to do a lot of stuff that isn’t just about acting.

“So, you know, you sort of don’t realise until it ends that you’ve just given yourself completely to it. It’s been nice to reconnect with a quieter life. But it was wonderful; it was great to wake up in the morning and go to work and blow up Daleks, you know. What a way to live your life!”

When Capaldi first took on the role of the Twelfth Doctor in 2013, he was an ashen-haired shock to Doctor Who’s system; moving away from the habit of casting young(ish) spunks as everybody’s favourite Gallifreyan, Capaldi brought a thunder-browed sense of authority to the role. His menacing, nonsense-free outer shell covered an innate goodness earned over centuries of hard-won victories and hard-felt losses. It was further below the surface than his immediate predecessors – he was more likely to be compared with William Hartnell’s First Doctor than David Tennant’s Tenth – but it was there. Along with the, uh, two hearts.

“I think he’s a great character,” Capaldi muses. “I think he’s not bothered about whether people like him, particularly, and he doesn’t have to be user-friendly, but at the same time, he’s incredibly compassionate and full of love. Full of love. But he’s not a human being, so that’s why I was always very keen to make him not just your zany uncle. I wanted him to be from somewhere else; I wanted him to be from space. So hopefully that’s what remains, that there’s an echo of… of creature, not a human being.”

As alien as The Doctor may be, his Twelfth incarnation had a very human origin. When Capaldi was first announced to be taking over from Matt Smith, plenty were quick to point out that he was no stranger to the show’s universe, having appeared on spin-off series Torchwood as well as having preceded that with a guest role as a Roman sculptor, Caecilius, in Tennant-era episode The Fires of Pompeii. (Incidentally, then-future Companion Karen Gillan also made her DW debut in this episode, in a much-less recognisable manner.)

"I think Jodie will be amazing, and a great Doctor."

The likeness the Twelfth Doctor shared with Capaldi’s ancient counterpart was, for a long time, winked at but never explicitly addressed, at least until the ninth season, when he outright acknowledged he had taken Caecilius’ appearance as a(n apparently oblique) reminder to himself about his unwavering purpose: to save people. However, Capaldi would have been just as happy if they never addressed it in-story, he says.

“I mean, I didn’t think it was necessary for them to do it,” he admits. “It’s part of the rough-and-tumble of making television, or making that amount of television; there are only x amount of actors, so some of them will show up again and again. But I thought that was quite fun, and it was nice… yeah.

“The funny thing is I look so completely different [then], it doesn’t even look like the same person! When I see that episode, it just seems like a completely different creature from the Doctor – but that’s quite good, I think. The trouble is, with Doctor Who, the more it goes on, the more explanations are made, the less mysterious it gets.”

As always with this show, with the departure of an old Doctor’s face comes the arrival of a new one, and Capaldi – who doesn’t really see new incarnations as the paragon of change that they’re often held up to be – is optimistic about the series’ future and the ways in which Whittaker will make the role her own when she takes the TARDIS’ helm later this year.

“The thing is, it doesn’t really change. I mean, I think the idea that Doctor Who is all about change is just propaganda,” he chuckles. “It just reassembles things to carry on doing the same thing. It’s just all about flying around the universe, blowing up monsters. As long as you do that, people will be happy. I think Jodie will be amazing, and a great Doctor. As long as she successfully runs around blowing up monsters, we’ll be happy. I’m sure she will.”

When he’s not filling up his post-Who calendar with convention spots and presumably coffee-fuelled jam sessions, Capaldi has also been keeping busy with film work. In the past year, he’s teamed up with not one but two different computer-generated bears in big-screen adaptations – Paddington 2, the unexpectedly excellent sequel to the also unexpectedly excellent 2014 original, and the as-yet unreleased Christopher Robin, which sounds like Hook but with Winnie the Pooh characters instead of child murder and sexy fairies.

In Christopher Robin, the title character (Ewan McGregor) is all grown up and has forgotten how to use the power of imagination (!), so his band of impossibly adorable friends, Winnie the Pooh (Jim Cummings), Piglet (Nick Mohammed), Rabbit (Capaldi), Owl (Toby Jones), Eeyore (Brad Garrett), Tigger (Chris O’Dowd) and… the rest… show up to teach him how to… imagine? Again?

“That was fun!” Capaldi enthuses of the voice role. “I worked with Mark Foster, who I’ve worked with before. He did World War Z and is a really good director, and he just said, ‘Look, do you want to come and do this thing?’ – I didn’t really know what it was.

“It’s the Winnie the Pooh stories but Christopher Robin’s grown up, played by Ewan McGregor, who really needs to reconnect with his pals. So they’ve created all of the Winnie the Pooh characters in computer-generated form, and they look incredible. They look just like toys, old toys, but they’re alive. I do the voice of Rabbit, and what that means is you actually spend hours in a studio improvising and doing these scenes. You never see the thing until the end, but I’ve seen bits and pieces of it, and it looks amazing.”

Beyond Supanova, Christopher Robin and an upcoming stint as the narrator for a documentary, Zoe Ball’s Hardest Road Home, Capaldi is looking forward to making the most of his newfound surplus time however he sees fit.  Whether that includes a potential return to his role as Mr Curry for a possible Paddington 3 is uncertain, but he wouldn’t necessarily say no should the opportunity arise to pop in for another visit with the family Brown.

“I think it’s a wonderful film,” he says of the series’ second entry. “I was very, very pleased to be part of that. I think they will be trying to do more of them, but it’s, you know, I don’t know when or where or whether I’d be involved. It all depends on the script, and Paul [King], who directed it, is absolutely lovely. Just a huge, huge talent. He’s extraordinary. He used to do The Mighty Boosh – I don’t know if you remember The Mighty Boosh. I love The Mighty Boosh. And Paul is just so creative and so clever and it’s him who really makes it all work. And also David Heyman, the producer, who did all the Harry Potter films as well.

“What is great with that film is that those are big films that cost a lot of money, but they’re very sincere, and that’s what’s great – the real heart. That will survive over the cash.”

Seasons 1-10 of Doctor Who are streaming on Stan.