David, let's start with, how good did it feel to slick back the hair, put on the braces, step into the highly polished brogues of Lord Baddingham for Season 2?

It felt deliciously familiar, I have to say.

It, he is ...

He's great fun to embody, uh, because it's quite liberating, I suppose, to get to indulge all those corners of your psychology that you don't allow yourself necessarily to inhabit, uh, in real life.

Uh, he's ...

Y- I mean, he's arguably psychopathic in the way that, uh, you know, nothing has consequence for him morally, it appears.

So, uh, i- that there's something quite liberating in being that person at work.

But do you think he thinks she'll always be there, that there's nothing that he could do that would result in her leaving him?

Yeah, what, what is your relationship with that character? And that is going to lead me to the, the sort of like investigate the folklore of you announcing you were going to do that when you were three years old.

[laughs] Well, without jumping the gun, I loved it from when I was a small, small child.

I was pretty obsessed with it as a show and as a character.

So when the v- in the very unlikely circumstances arose that I was asked to take over on the show, a show which had not existed for many years in between, I mean, there's lots of reasons why this was unlikely, it kind of felt like a wonderful, impossible opportunity, and I loved it.

It was everything I hoped it might be.

It was hugely, uh, inspiring and endlessly creatively satisfying and really good fun, and it definitely changed my life in many, many ways.

Just that kind of platform, that kind of shop window, I suppose, inevitably does.

Was that a nice exercise for you? Did you-

Yeah.

If you're, if you've got to play father and daughter, if you're looking into your actual daughter's eyes, it's, uh...

No, it's great.

I mean, I'm just so proud of her.

She's just, um, she's done a few jobs.

This is not, it's not her first rodeo.

She's got a, a pretty impressive CV already to be honest, but, so I think we were...

Yeah, yeah.

has allowed them to kind of enjoy what being human means and they sort of knock the edges off each other and they become more like each other as well and now they don't want it to end and there's this terrible plan to bring it all to an end and so they have to do what they can to stop it

And about that read-through.

Read-throughs are always awful because they're like that.

They're a first day of school.

You're meeting lots of people for the first time.

Hundreds of people you never meet again as well.

You know, screeds of executive producers and I'm so-and-so from the BBC and I'm so-and-so from Amazon.

always looked forward to doing one of

Do you remember what was so captivating about the show to you?

Something about that show and the combination of elements, certainly that central character, always fascinated me.

I just thought he was brilliant.

I just thought he was cool, he was clever.

He wasn't, uh, he, he sort of, he was dressed in sort of brilliant, cool, mad clothes, but he looked like a normal human, and I think that was quite important to me as a, as, as a fairly geeky young child.

I didn't imagine I could ever aspire to be Superman or The Incredible Hulk or, you know, I, I was sort of quite weedy and I, I wore glasses and I had a terrible haircut.

So all those things still felt possible in the world of the Doctor.

All of the things that you had learned and- and the ways that you've trained help you sort of embody this role?

Why was that?

Mm-hmm.

It was one of the, Max Webster, our director, uh, it was one of his very earliest ideas.

He was very, he was fascinated with the idea of Macbeth as a soldier.

He'd done a production of Henry V where they'd looked a lot into the- the actuality of being a soldier who goes to war, what that might do to you, ideas around PTSD, uh, and shell shock.

And, uh, he talked to people who'd experienced that, and the idea that one would hear voices, that one would imagine things were happening that weren't.

And he sort of took the idea of PTSD and put it onto Macbeth, and it- it kind of fits remarkably well.

Can you talk about how you found a way to play him?