Doctor Who's Matt Smith: 'I want to embrace the madness'
"Walking down the street to buy a pint of milk is now a very different experience from what it was two years ago,” says Matt Smith. “Nothing can really prepare you for such a dramatic change in your life.”
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Earlier this year, the floppy-haired 28 year-old became the youngest actor ever cast in the lead role of TV phenomenon Doctor Who – the first series with Smith in the Tardis is released on DVD on Monday – and the experience has turned his world upside down. “People come up to me 50 times a day,” he says. “How do I deal with it? I wear a hoodie and a pair of shades and I keep my head down. But I knew what I was entering into. [Celebrity] is just part of the remit – and a small price to pay when you get to run around time and space every day!”
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Previously best known for TV roles in Philip Pullman adaptation The Ruby in the Smoke and Party Animals, Smith says he is well aware of his responsibilities as an ambassador for one of the most potent and durable brands in British television. “People feel very affectionate towards the programme because it has such a heritage in our culture. When children come up and ask me, ‘What’s your favourite monster?’, you see how they’d be if the actual Doctor turned up in the Tardis on their doorstep, so I always try to be patient. If you’re 10 and Doctor Who seems impatient with you, that’s going to be rubbish.”
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Smith’s Doctor – a performance which draws on elements of Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Inspector Clouseau – is very much his own creation: a high-energy, high-intelligence, yet borderline-unhinged character. “I really like the episode in the last series where the Doctor moves in with a landlord played by James Corden,” says Smith. In it the Doctor is trying to pass himself off as a regular lodger. “We see the Doctor behaving in a way which he believes to be normal but which is in fact bizarre. But we forgive him because he does it with such spirit and good grace. He’s not afraid to be himself – which is liberating and endearing. He’s never underhand – just a bit mad. I want to embrace the madness and push it further!” |
As well as his appearances in Doctor Who, Smith will soon be seen starring in Womb, a futuristic new movie about a woman (played by former Bond girl Eva Green) who clones her dead husband (Smith). The actor also takes the lead in Christopher and His Kind, a new BBC Two drama about how during the 1930s the writer Christopher Isherwood fled the stifling effect of both English society and his mother for the more louche pleasures of Berlin.
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