Doctor Who Stars Ncuti Gatwa & Millie Gibson Talk 2024 Show, Doctor History, and More

Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson, the stars of Doctor Who, are entering a new era.

It’s an era that prescribes surreal, out of this world experiences, like lighting up the London Eye before the BFI premiere of their first episode last December, or staring in awe at the 42nd Street Shuttle in New York last week, wrapped in promotional images of their own faces. When Gatwa and Gibson, as well as showrunner Russell T Davies, appear over video call, they’re tucked away somewhere secret in New York for a long day of press.

Doctor Who, which drops its two-episode premiere on Disney+ on May 10, tells the story of Ncuti Gatwa as the latest incarnation of the Doctor, a time-traveling alien from another planet, and Millie Gibson as his companion, Ruby Sunday. The British sci-fi series follows the pair as they travel through time and space in the TARDIS, fighting creatures, solving mysteries, and saving the universe.

“He’s in his ‘living his best life’ era,” 31-year-old Gatwa tells Teen Vogue of his new Doctor. “Twirling in clubs, in kilts. He’s going for it.” In Jodie Whittaker’s era of the show, the Doctor learned that they were found abandoned as a child and adopted by the Time Lords, which dovetails with Ruby being left on a church doorstep as a baby and taken in by a loving mother.

“Ruby is curious,” 19-year-old Gibson tells Teen Vogue. “She’s hungry for a new chapter in her life, and as soon as she meets the Doctor, she knows that whatever he is, she’s magnetized to him. From the outset, they’re connected in a lost children theme. They have a lot of love for one another, but she’s feisty and I’m very excited for everyone to see her. And I just hope they like how she does it.”

Watching the Doctor and Ruby on screen and witnessing Gatwa and Gibson in real life is like looking at the same picture twice. It’s all girly-pop bestie vibes, and they’d be the first to agree with that summation. The mavitational force of their Doctor-companion relationship is undeniable in the show, but they share a closeness offscreen that is pure symbiosis.

Nothing illustrates their bond like the way they finish each other’s sentences: “The fact that we’re on a subway—” Gibson starts, and then Gatwa says, “—blows my mind. There’s American fans. I had no idea. I thought it was something that only we knew—” and back to Gibson, “—because this is their first introduction to it. So the fact that there’s already fans is like, what—” and back to Gatwa, “—is going on?”

Of course, the series has maintained a steady heartbeat in the U.S., airing most recently on BBC America, which also launched the Matt Smith era of the show to great fanfare back in 2010. Gibson, who shares a first name with Karen Gillan’s companion Amelia Pond, grew up watching this era as a child, so she’s in good company with fans who adore Amy Pond. “I’ve met my people,” she exclaims when we mention her. “We should have a club.”

“It feels very exciting to have this hype and buzz around the show,” Gatwa says. “It's an amazing show, and it has been for the past 60 years. We're very lucky to have Disney+ on board that's able to share what the Brits have been keeping as a tightly kept secret to ourselves.” The show deserves this moment, Gatwa adds, because it’s “got so much heart and compassion.”

At the helm for the first time since his departure with David Tennant over a decade ago is showrunner Russell T Davies, the scribe behind the original Queer As Folk and more recently, It’s A Sin. The way television is packaged and consumed has changed since he left, so he’s done a bit of retooling, reinvigorating the sci-fi sensation with “a very 2024 energy.”

“It’s the progressive, dynamic, modern world. It feels like 2024, on screen. It feels modern, it feels exciting, and those two actors reflect that. So that’s the point,” Davies tells Teen Vogue. “I wasn't coming back for an act of nostalgia. And not to recreate the past in any way, shape or form, but to look forward. The moment we found those two actors, that was the moment I thought, yes, we can do this, absolutely.”

The task of returning to propel the show into a new age called for Davies’ trusty team from the 2005 revival — executive producers Phil Collinson, Jane Tranter, and Julie Gardner — chiefly because Davies knew they “would work themselves to death, frankly, for Doctor Who, because I know how much hard work it is.”

“I never wanted to feel like I was coming back, I always wanted it to feel like I was going forward,” Davies adds, thrilled to now be talking openly about a season of work that once existed solely in his mind. “I can actually point to the episodes as proof. If we had been talking six months ago, it all would have been theoretical. Now I can actually point to the episodes and say, look at what I wanted to achieve. There it is in Millie. There it is in Ncuti.”

Gibson, who cut her teeth playing Kelly Neelan in the beloved British soap Coronation Street, is grateful for the grind that comes with working on a soap set with such a swift turnaround. “It’s such a big machine. If one cog falls out of place then it all falls apart, so it’s a really big team. You all have to be on it and know your stuff,” Gibson says. “I learned pace. I learned knowing lines really quickly. I learned getting to emotions really quickly.”

Before she left the Street, Gibson was filming 13 scenes a day. “I think people can be quite snobby towards soap actors, and it's really not necessary to because as soon as I entered that world, I realized how much respect I had for soap actors.” If there’s anybody who loves soaps, it’s Russell T Davies. “And thank God,” Gibson says, “because he wouldn’t have even cast me I don’t think.”

It’s all been terrific training for her, especially in her move to prestige sci-fi drama, where the set is like a revolving door of directors across the shooting blocks. “It’s like shifting personalities and energy,” Gibson says. “It’s a bit of a shift within us,” she catches Gatwa’s eye, “because we’re like okay, we have to figure out how they’re doing this now. So I think that as well was really good to learn on Corrie.”

Gatwa has spoken previously about his knockout performance in the climax of episode five, “Dot and Bubble,” a story about social media which is set in a colony, under a dome, on an alien planet. At the time of shooting, Gatwa was running on fumes going between Doctor Who and the final season of Sex Education. But, determined to push through, he dug deep.

He’s vigilant with his words now, careful of not spoiling the story, but comes up short — “That was such a good question,” his voice booms — and he sits, searching for his response. “I just had to dig into resilience. What the Doctor has to often do is think of the bigger picture and the greater good as well, so it was about that. Just being completely selfless,” Gatwa says. “I'm not, Ncuti's not. The Doctor is completely selfless, and being like, ‘let me not think about myself in this moment and think about the greater good and about other people.’”

A quote circles in my mind; I read it to Gatwa and Gibson. “Face your front, which means face your path,” the quote says. “Don't look right and don't look left, because these are other people's journeys, and if you're looking at their journeys, you're going to get lost. You don't need to compare yourself. Your journey is fine.” And doesn’t that sound like something the Doctor would say?

“That sounds like it’s from a book, darling. It’s so beautiful,” Gibson says. Not a book, but from Gatwa’s Teen Vogue Young Hollywood 2020 interview. It proves Gatwa is exactly the right person to fly the TARDIS, that this was destined. “The Doctor’s path is helping others, and that’s what he does at that moment,” Gatwa says of “Dot and Bubble.”

Gibson spent the night before our interview watching Doctor Who guest star Jinkx Monsoon as Audrey in Westside Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors. “She was absolutely insane,” Gibson says. “Honestly, the roar of the crowd when she came on the stage, it was unbelievable. She couldn’t get a line out because of that many people cheering her.”

Davies has previously teased that “73 Yards,” the season’s fourth episode, is one of the greatest things he’s ever made in his life. “I hope. We’ll see. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe I shouldn’t say things like that, but I'm delighted by it,” he says. He throws around words like “mysterious” and “strange,” like an “independent spooky film,” the kind of Doctor Who story “that literally works under its own rules.” Davies wrote the script, and even he still wonders what happens in the episode. As for the upcoming season as a whole? “Extreme adventures in the human heart,” Davies says.

It’s also Gibson’s most anticipated watch for viewers. Upon filming “73 Yards,” she had just moved away from her home in Greater Manchester to settle in Cardiff, alone. “I didn’t even have my beautiful Ncuti with me, so I was kind of just sussing things around on my own,” she says. “It’s a very special episode to me, because I do watch that back and I’m like, I’m proud of you there Mills, you’ve done well there. When you watch it, I think you’ll see why.” (Gatwa beams with pride: “18 years old, leading a juggernaut show on her own.”) “I didn’t even have my dog,” Gibson recalls, “I was lost.”

Ruby’s foundling storyline was influenced by documentaries that Davies had been watching, in which he learned that foundlings are no longer genealogical mysteries, and watched as DNA testing helped people find their families. “That’s never been possible before, and the emotional journeys of those people have been absolutely extraordinary. I thought, wow that’s a good story. So that got me hooked,” Davies says.

By coincidence, as Davies pondered a foundling story, he watched Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor experience a similar revelation. “They’re actually on the same quest, they've had the same loss, they've had the same gaps in their lives,” Davies says of uniting the Doctor and Ruby on common ground.

“At the same time in my own life, I'm getting older,” Davies continues. “I think if you're in your 30s and 40s, all your friends start having babies. As you get to your 50s and 60s, your friends start adopting, or they're fostering. And I know more and more people who've adopted children, which I think is literally a life saving thing to do, and I'm far too much of a coward to have ever done it myself. And I admire my friends and my relatives who've done it so enormously. It's an extraordinary thing to do, and I wanted to put that on screen.”

“The fact that people barely know the difference between fostering and adopting, which are profoundly different things, and yet both done with the same great big beating heart, I was just very interested in that.” Whatever Davies had written next, if it weren’t Doctor Who, would’ve featured this theme at center stage. The great adoption and fostering drama is yet to be written, he says, something in the vein of ITV’s Cold Feet. “In my next life.”

Ncuti Gatwa couldn’t have done this without Millie Gibson. “The character became so clear to me from the moment she walked into the room,” he says. “Millie has got such amazing, infectious, joyous energy, and we keep us all laughing on set. And Ruby Sunday drives the season. Narratively, that character pushes the whole arc of the season. But without my little Gemini here, there's no way I could've done it—”

“—It all falls apart,” says Gibson, following Gatwa’s train of thought again. “We hold each other's hands all the way through. And there was a point, because I mean, nine months, every day together, you have to get to know someone's ways. And it was a point where we kind of Bluetoothed emotions. I was like, you feeling like this today? Yeah, me too. And so I think just being able to promote all our hard work is a real proud moment.”

Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor, and that’s given us a number of firsts for Doctor Who. He’s the first Black actor to be the Doctor full-time. He’s the first queer actor to be the Doctor. Acknowledging so is powerful, necessary. But he is, I tell him as we wrap up, the first Ncuti to be the Doctor. “You’re gonna make me cry,” Gatwa says. Every experience that has built him, every love, every loss, all the joy, all the sorrow, his dexterity and talent — and yes, his Blackness and his queerness, have delivered him here. The first Ncuti Doctor. Gatwa holds his head in his hands: “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear.”

Doctor Who streams from May 10 on Disney+.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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