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
Paula Milne was really the first thing that drew me to 'The Politician's Husband.'
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.
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.
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.
And the very fact of how you speak somehow influences who you are. The way you move, the way you think, it seeps into your being, and it's quite hard to really break that down entirely.
I often stop when I'm doing something, in the middle of rehearsals or some other job, and I try to take a minute to think Okay, this might be as good as it gets, so drink it in, appreciate it now. So far, I've been lucky because another job has always come along to equal the last.
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.
I'm quite happy to leave it still feeling that way, leave it before it starts feeling like a job. ... I have such fond memories of watching 'Doctor Who' when I was a kid and growing up, that if I've left anybody anywhere with memories as fond, then I feel like I've done my job.
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.
When you're playing a real person there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.
We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.
I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.
I think doing different accents is part of the job of acting really. It's something else that I quite enjoy the challenge of, to be honest.