Jodie Whittaker was 23 years old and newly graduated from drama school when she was cast in her first on-screen role as the title character in Venus, opposite none other than Peter O’Toole. Being required to hold one’s own against the then seven-time Oscar-nominated acting legend might have daunted some actors, but the young woman from Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire seemed surprised at the suggestion.



“Everyone kept asking: ‘Where did the director find you?’, like he had picked me up on a train platform or something,” she told a journalist at the time. In fact, having left drama school early for a part at the Globe theatre opposite Mark Rylance, another formidable co-star, she had “rocked up” at the audition feeling full of confidence. “I know I seem like I’m something from a documentary. But, eh – no.”

This solid, unshowy self-belief has steered Whittaker through a career, in the 12 years since, that has encompassed period roles, comedy and anguished dramatic performances, most notably her acclaimed portrayal of the bereaved mother Beth Latimer in three series of Broadchurch.

It will also, no doubt, be helpful in the next few months as Whittaker assumes one of the most talked-about roles in television history, as the first female Doctor in Doctor Who’s 54-year history.

The teasing announcement of Whittaker’s casting, screened immediately after Sunday’s Wimbledon men’s final, caused an immediate shockwave, notably on social media, where a minority of enraged Doctor Who fans declared they would never watch the programme again, and tens of thousands of people retweeted a video of a young girl’s astonished delight that “the new Doctor is a girl!”.

“I got a news alert on my phone and I thought: ‘I just can’t believe that,’” says Anthony Wilcox, who directed Whittaker in the feature film Hello Carter in 2013. “And then, 10 seconds later, I thought, well of course – she is absolutely perfect.”

Why? “She is exactly the sort of person you would want to go on an adventure with, and who you would back to lead you out of trouble. You can imagine her getting the better of a Dalek and leaving a smile on your face at the same time, and those two things combined make it an ideal piece of casting.”

Mark Rylance, left, and Jodie Whittaker, centre, in The Storm at Shakespeare’s Globe. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Though she had not quite, until Sunday at least, broken into household name territory, a glance at the roles Whittaker has played reveals why her face, at least, is likely to be familiar. Early parts in the St Trinian’s movies were followed by performances in the costume dramas Cranford and Marchlands, the adaptation of Sarah Waters’s book The Night Watch and Joe Cornish’s cult zombie-meets-hoodie thriller Attack the Block, which also launched the career of the Star Wars actor John Boyega.

She appeared in an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, as Anne Hathaway’s best friend in the film adaption of the bestseller One Day and in the highly regarded film about the Belfast punk scene Good Vibrations, managing a faultless Northern Irish accent.

But her quietly devastating performance in Broadchurch was key to clinching the Doctor Who role, not least because Chris Chibnall, the writer of Broadchurch, is the new executive producer of the sci-fi show. Whittaker, he said this week, had always been his first choice to take over from Peter Capaldi as the 13th Doctor, describing her as “a super-smart force of nature”.

The same term is used by Christian Burgess, vice-principal and director of drama at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, who taught Whittaker when she first joined the school as a mouthy northerner whose background was very different to that of many of her classmates. They have remained close friends since.

“I think initially Jodie felt she hadn’t had a very powerful formal education, but she has got this innate actor’s intelligence which she gradually came to recognise as being much more useful than having been to Oxford or Cambridge,” he says.

“She’s fearless, that’s the thing. And when she decides she wants a job – and she’s quite selective about what she wants to do – she goes into a room and convinces them that they have to have her.”

He recalls running into Hanif Kureishi, who wrote the script for Venus, who told him: “That girl Jodie is amazing!” The novelist and screenwriter had originally written the role for a Londoner, but the young actor had convinced him it should be played by a northerner – and that northerner should be her.

In her final year, Burgess recalls, Whittaker played a small role in a production in which she had to briefly ride a bike – “and her agent signed her on the basis of riding this bicycle across the stage”. Why? “She was hilarious, and laughing. So free. She has this freedom in her body. And they recognised it.” It has been a very useful story, he notes, to tell students in subsequent years who complain about not being given bigger parts.

A former drama school classmate and close friend, who watched as Whittaker was the first in their year to be snapped up by an agent, says: “The ones [in our class] who did particularly well early on were people who were very switched on, had figured out the business very quickly and also knew themselves very well. That’s something Jodie did very well. She knows who she is.”

Jodie Whittaker and Peter O’Toole at the London film festival in 2006. Photograph: Ian West/PA

The girl who would one day become the Doctor was born in 1982 and brought up in Skelmanthorpe, a small village outside Huddersfield, where her father had a windows business and her mother was a nurse. At school, she has confessed, she didn’t have much interest in academic subjects, but was an unfailing show-off. “I was the attention-seeking child in class who needed everyone to look at meeee!”

After she decided she wanted to make a career of acting, her parents were always 100% supportive. “Their attitude was that I should go for the thing I wanted and [not] waste time on a back-up plan. They were fantastic in saying: ‘If you want it, do it.’”

A close-knit and fiercely protective gang from her youth are still among her closest friends – among them the writer and director Rachel Tunnard, with whom she made the award-winning Adult Life Skills last year. “She calls them her besties,” says Burgess. “There’s a circle of them from all walks of life, and they have been friends forever, and they look after each other, and I think they are very, very important to her.”

The actor herself is equally protective of her privacy – she rarely speaks in interviews about her marriage to the American actor Christian Contreras, whom she met at drama school, and has sought to shield their young child from the publicity storm following the Doctor Who announcement.

But for Nicola Shindler, who was executive producer of the forthcoming BBC1 thriller Trust Me, in which Whittaker takes on the challenging central role, she is also refreshingly unstarry.

“This is going to sound really sickly, but she is the nicest woman, and really hardworking,” says Shindler. “And she led a cast fantastically. She was always there, never complaining, despite having so much to do.”

Jodie Whittaker in Trust Me. Photograph: Mark Mainz/BBC/Red/Mark Mainz

Whittaker’s role, as a nurse who assumes the identity of her doctor best friend, required her to learn a lot of technical procedures and spend long hours on set, says Shindler. “She was in every day and she worked her arse off, but in a really pleasant way … If you have an actor at the centre of everything who has a really positive attitude, who is going to work really hard and embrace the whole process, it is hard for everyone else not to follow suit.” The thriller, made by RED Productions, screens in early August.

Leading the cast and production of a drama as significant as Doctor Who will require all the actor’s toughness, charisma and charm. But for the author Jenny Colgan, who has written a number of Doctor Who novels, the fact that the newest Doctor is a woman won’t change anything about the programme: “It’s nothing more than some pronoun difficulties.”

Colgan will confess, however, to being delighted that a woman is to assume the role – “mostly because I think it will be brilliant and fun, and partly because my children, after a year of Wonder Woman and Ghostbusters, genuinely didn’t even realise there was or might be a fuss.”

Jodie Whittaker with Andrew Buchan in Broadchurch. Photograph: ITV/Rex

Jodie Whittaker

Born: 3 June 1982

Age: 35

Career: Made an instant impact on leaving drama school with roles opposite Peter O’Toole and Mark Rylance. A busy and diverse career followed on stage, film and particularly TV, in which she has barely stopped working.



High point: A powerful and acclaimed performance in three series of ITV’s Broadchurch, followed by the announcement this week that she had been cast as the first female Doctor.



Low point: News of Whittaker’s casting inevitably led to a backlash among some Doctor Who fans (“Nobody wants a Tardis full of bras,” said one), while several tabloid newspapers responded by publishing photographs of the actor naked in previous roles (“Doctor Nude!”).



What she says: “I am a quiet person’s nightmare. The only time I shut up is when I’m reading, because I’m a book geek. I was the attention-seeking child in class who needed everyone to look at meeee. Luckily that got channelled into acting, because I would have been terrible at anything else.”

What they say: “[Fans were] shocked to begin with, but I think the underlying feeling is excitement, because we are going to have something very new that is going to inject some life into the show.” Sebastian Brook, editor, Doctor Who Online