THE BIG PICTURE
- Matt Smith almost turned down the role of the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who , but his agent convinced him to take it.
- Karen Gillan believes Matt Smith is the best actor to have played the Doctor.
- Smith has since moved on to other successful projects like The Crown and House of the Dragon , but his time on Doctor Who is still cherished.
Doctor Who‘s Eleventh Doctor could’ve looked very different. In a recent interview with Variety, Matt Smith says he almost turned down the role of the Eleventh Doctor in the longstanding British Sci-Fi series. He says he thought about it “briefly. But my agent, very quickly, was like, ‘You’re doing it.’ Thank God.” Smith would go on to portray the Eleventh Doctor from 2010 to 2014.
In 2009, the actor was announced to take the reins from David Tennant. Smith was also the youngest actor, to this day, to be announced in the titular role at only 26. “I would walk down the street,” he says, “and people would say ‘Don’t break Doctor Who!'”
The Doctor should never travel alone, and it was only a short time later that Karen Gillan was announced as the Eleventh Doctor’s first companion, Amy Pond. Gillan would play her from 2010 to 2012, reprising her role in Smith’s final episode of Doctor Who “The Time of the Doctor.” At the beginning of their time together on Doctor Who, Gillan says Smith “definitely was feeling pressure, but it never showed in any way.” Gillan and Smith would eventually be joined by Arthur Darvill‘s Rory Williams, Amy’s husband and the couple, affectionately called ‘The Ponds’ would travel with the Doctor together.
Matt Smith is the ‘Best Actor That’s Ever Played the Doctor’ says Karen Gillan
“Being Doctor Who is akin to being a former president or prime minister,” says Edgar Wright, who cast Smith in Last Night in SoHo (2021). “Maybe some other actors who played Doctor Who in the past have found it difficult to move on from it. Matt probably did exactly the right thing by taking on a wealth of very different parts in the immediate wake of that show.” In addition to Last Night in SoHo, Smith has gone on to star in other massive television hits such as Netflix’s The Crown and HBO Max’s House of the Dragon.
Smith says he didn’t expect House of the Dragon to match the success of Game of Thrones. He credits his time in Doctor Who to helping him deal with it, saying “in a way, I was lucky, because I had that in Doctor Who a bit. But it feels like people judge it on its own terms. You’re never going to create the moment in time that Game of Thrones was — the love and affection and scale of that show. It’s never going to be that, because it was a moment in time.”
Though Smith has moved onto other projects after leaving Doctor Who, many still look back on his tenure with great fondness including Gillan saying:
“To me, he is the best actor that’s ever played the Doctor, because he has an otherworldly quality. He’s naturally eccentric, and he reels off technical jargon like it’s a shopping list.”
If you’d like to take a trip down memory lane and rewatch your favorite Amy and Eleven moments, Doctor Who (2005-2022) is available to stream on HBO Max.
