Jodie Whittaker met a ‘Doctor Who’ fan who awkwardly told her she wanted Ben Whishaw in the TARDIS.
The 36-year-old actress – whose first series as the Time Lord aired last year – revealed how she was in a cafe in Wales before the big reveal when a 17-year-old girl approached her.
Speaking on ‘David Tennant Does A Podcast With…’, she said: "I could see her really psyching herself up. And she just went, ‘Are you…?’ and I just went, ‘Yeah…’
"And I said, ‘Can I talk to you to one side because I’m trying to be a bit sneaky and a bit hide-y?’ And she went, ‘Yeah yeah yeah’. So I went and ordered, and I came back and went, ‘Are you a Whovian?’
"And she went, ‘Yeah… I really wanted Ben Whishaw’. So I went, ‘You still might get him, the possibilities are endless, you could get anyone you wanted!’. I laughed my head off."
Rather than the ‘Mary Poppins Returns’ actor taking over from previous star Peter Capaldi, Jodie became the first woman to take on the iconic part.
The ‘Broadchurch’ actress admitted she found the continuity of the show overwhelming until new showrunner Chris Chibnall gave her a "bible" of sorts to guide her through.
She added: "For me, it was reading the stuff. I wanted to read it. I wanted to do my homework. And Chibs printed me basically an encyclopedia of kind of the facts.
"It’s like a massive Wikipedia. It’s like a dissertation. It’s like, ‘This contradicts this, this is a throughline, this could be this but really it’s open’."
As well as the intimidating amount of information she was faced with, Jodie also had to grapple with the enormity of the role and fanbase.
She explained: "If I’d have been crap, which I have been in some jobs – there are jobs I’ve done where I’ve gone, ‘I smashed that’, and there are jobs I’m like, ‘oh my god I was awful, I was miscast, I was terrible, I pitched it completely wrong’. Because that’s the nature of the thing.
"But this job, had I pitched it wrong – I don’t necessarily think I’ve got it right, but I know there’s obviously not been such a huge backlash since it came out – but I didn’t really realise until then that that I could’ve absolutely set us all bloody back here!"
Doctor Who fan told Jodie Whittaker they wanted Ben Whishaw
