David Tennant is one of the most beloved actors around, with acclaimed turns as The Doctor
and Detective Alec Hardy on "Broadchurch." So why haven't you heard from him lately? It isn't
like he's stopped working. He has stayed pretty busy, but with projects you may not have seen.
Don't get us wrong, we're not here to judge. In fact, if the only TV show you regularly watch or
pay attention to is "Doctor Who," you might be doing something right. Launched in 1963,
the ongoing adventure of the time and space-traveling do-gooder known as the
Doctor remains an intensely influential sci-fi institution. In part, this is by virtue of
having existed for so long. If a person feels like watching "Doctor Who" and absolutely nothing else,
that person could certainly manage that without boredom ever presenting itself as
a major problem. Tennant's three seasons alone could tide one over for a while.
Tennant's Tenth Doctor appears in at least two of the best "Doctor Who" episodes of all time:
"Blink" and "The Girl In The Fireplace." His run didn't just wow fans — it reinvigorated
"Doctor Who" as a whole. So if this is still what you know Tennant best for,
well, you've got taste. But if it is, in fact, your preference to watch
nothing except "Doctor Who," it explains why you haven't heard from the man in a while,
as he hasn't regularly been on that show since President Obama's first term.
"Don't be ridiculous."
We should clarify that when we say David Tennant does not appear
regularly on "Doctor Who," we're referring to the BBC television program. But while his time as a
physical presence on the TARDIS ended in 2010, his time as the Doctor continues to this day.
The Tenth Doctor joins forces with Tom Baker's indispensable Fourth Doctor, with their original
actors voicing both characters, in the audio drama "Out Of Time," released in August 2020.
This is enormously exciting for fans: The Fourth Doctor, who Baker portrayed from 1974 to 1981,
still stands as one of the most widely-recognized versions of the character.
But this production is actually not all that out of the ordinary for Tennant,
who records Doctor Who audio dramas all the time.
In fact, it just so happens that "Doctor Who" related projects only comprise a
fraction of Tennant's extensive audio drama and audio book catalog. His participation
in audio "Who" actually dates back to before Christopher Eccleston rebooted the role in 2005:
Tennant played a non-leading part in 2001's "Doctor Who: Colditz,"
a story involving Nazis who somehow gain access to the TARDIS at the conclusion of World War II.
"Doctor Who" has not yet produced a video game major crossover success just yet. But just
like James Bond, Marvel Comics, and other major franchises with similar longevity, the beloved
series has been churning out video games for pretty much as long as video games have existed.
This brings us to "Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality." The game's official website
describes "Edge of Reality" as a reimagining of 2019's "Doctor Who: The Edge of Time,"
a VR game for console and PC. Where "Edge of Time" features the Thirteenth Doctor played
by Jodie Whittaker, "Reality" includes both her and David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor.
According to the game's official website, Edge of Reality will see the Doctors address
a threat to all of reality. It pits the player against Daleks, Weeping Angels,
Cybermen, and various lesser-known but equally-deadly intergalactic baddies.
As far as Tennant goes, it's basically a continuation of his already extensive
catalogue of Who-related voiceover work. But the jump from audio books
to games is significant for his fans — you can't play an audio book, after all.
"You need my voice in particular. The cleverest voice in the room."
Everybody's got a podcast these days,
including our man David Tennant. His podcast, featuring the uninspiring name
"David Tennant Does A Podcast With…" began in 2019 and has been running every week since.
This series of hour-long conversations with Tennant's fellow famous people
is a delightful project for Tennant fans of all stripes.
Notable guests include US politician and activist Stacey Abrams, author Neil Gaiman,
actress Elisabeth Moss, former "Doctor Who" star Billie Piper, and many others.
Unsurprisingly, Tennant's got a knack for cultivating engaging discourse.
"David Tennant Does A Podcast With…" plays out in roughly the same playful
spirit as Marc Maron's "WTF:" the host and guest take a seemingly unscripted,
casual journey through the latter's life, career, ideas, attitudes, and anecdotes, plus any other
subjects they stumble into. Tennant hasn't been in the podcasting game for as long as Maron, or
many other well-known podcast hosts with a similar sensibility. But Tennant makes up for
his lack of experience with his easygoing nature, disarming charm, and engaging Scottish accent.
By no means did David Tennant drop off of television after "Doctor Who." In fact,
for certain demographics, Doctor Who might not even be the program for which he's most famous.
David Tennant voiced the lead role on "DuckTales,"
a celebrated reboot of the 1987 cartoon of the same name.
If you've seen "DuckTales" in its modern incarnation and didn't recognize David
Tennant, you don't need to feel like a dumb-dumb:
he appears in the role of the billionaire mallard Scrooge McDuck.
The reboot has been met with an abundance of praise – a major feat in any case,
but especially impressive when one considers the fact that people
love the '80s "DuckTales" series. At the risk of blasphemy, we're going to go ahead and say
the new DuckTales doesn't just earn that praise ... it might surpass the original cartoon. The
humor and storytelling can keep adults in the room interested without alienating any kids,
the cast is star-studded, and, most importantly, Huey, Dewey, and Louie don't emulate their
Uncle Donald's unintelligible squawking. Instead, Donald's nephews sound like the
famous comedians who do their voices. That is a seriously major improvement.
"I promise I won't let anything bad happen to ya."
The miniseries "Good Omens," starring the one and only David Tennant, burst onto Amazon Prime
in May of 2019. Based on the 1990 Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett novel of the same name,
"Good Omens" involves a demon played by Tennant, an angel played by Michael Sheen, their unlikely
friendship, and various factors pertaining to the biblical end of all life in the universe. The cast
also includes John Hamm, Miranda Richardson, and Frances McDormand, who portrays God.
While "Good Omens" is not as culturally prevalent as some of Tennant's other work, it was a slam
dunk in terms of quality: Critics almost all got a real kick out of it. Meanwhile, author
Neil Gaiman has said he found the experience of making the series wildly educational, especially
in regards to his professional transition from full-time wordsmith to television showrunner.
In a roundabout way, that means we have David Tennant to thank for whatever success
is enjoyed by Netflix's "Sandman" series, on which Gaiman serves as executive producer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people discovered all kinds of awesome activities you can do
without going outside. You can watch movies. You can watch television. You can read books.
You can play board games ... and that's pretty much everything. As for things you can't do?
Well, you can't film a television series about traveling the circumference of the
world in a hot-air balloon. If that's your objective,
you're going to have to wait until the pandemic is over, or at least has subsided significantly.
The eight-episode limited series "Around The World in 80 Days" took
a pandemic-mandated production pause back in March 2020 and resumed shooting in November.
This TV adaptation of the 1872 novel by Jules Verne stars Tennant as Phileas Fogg,
the gambling protagonist, appearing alongside Leonie Benesch as Detective Fix and Ibrahim Koma
as Passepartout. It looks to be a whimsical and exciting updating of the classic story,
and the talent in the main ensemble is seriously impressive. It releases in late 2021.
There's a pretty significant problem with our collective preoccupation with major
streaming platforms. Namely, if anything cool or interesting comes out on one of
the lesser-known services, we might not find out about it until months later.
So if you didn't notice David Tennant's turn as convicted serial killer and really,
really creepy dude Dennis Nilsen, we can't blame you: the three-part 2020 series "Des"
is available on the little-known platform Sundance Now. It's well worth seeking out,
however, even if it does mean signing up for yet another streaming service. The searing drama got
some pretty positive feedback, with Tennant's performance praised as his most unsettling and
upsetting to date. Keep in mind, one of Tennant's most famous roles happens to be Kilgrave,
a homicidal abuser with mind-control powers. Still, the critics urge us to believe that
next to his depiction of Nilsen, Kilgrave comes off as well-adjusted and socially acceptable.
We shouldn't define Tennant's career, or even judge his artistic instincts, based
on a handful of roles cherry-picked off a CV that has been steadily expanding since 1988, of course.
But it is a pretty funny coincidence that we recognize him primarily as either a
happy-go-lucky fantasy character like the Doctor or Scrooge McDuck ... or as a
homicidal sociopath like Nilsen or Kilgrave. The public seems to prefer David Tennant as
one extreme or the other – and it seems he likes taking those over-the-top roles, too.
The Coronavirus pandemic had a disastrous effect on every industry, including the entertainment
industry. Massive delays were put on several productions in order to help stop the spread
of the disease, and it was a difficult situation to try to adapt to and film around. Thus, it isn't
exactly surprising that we didn't get a ton of notable pandemic films or TV shows either — but
a few did make it out of creative brains and into existence. "Staged" is a perfect example of this.
"Staged" stars David Tennant and his "Good Omens" co-star Michael Sheen as exaggerated
versions of themselves. That's right: this is one of those fictionalized-real-people affairs,
a la Keanu Reeves in "Always Be My Maybe."
"It's called Vice Breaker. It's like truth or dare, but a little more apocalyptic."
In "Staged," Tennant and Sheen are set to star in a production of "Six Characters in Search of an
Author" by Luigi Pirandello, but the production faces an indefinite delay due to the pandemic
lockdown of pretty much every stage in Europe. The pair of actors decide to rehearse and cast
the play over Zoom. As viewing experiences go, Staged resonates like a digital, British version
of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Check it out, and we'd encourage you to go in without doing too much
reading about it: there are some incredible guest appearances that are great surprises.
The disappointing fate of Marvel's first attempt at putting the Marvel Cinematic Universe on
streaming television has been well documented. As a result, it's easy to forget there was a
time when Kevin Feige would've been crazy to act like Netflix's Marvel output didn't count as canon
MCU material. The first season of "Jessica Jones" was particularly well received, and
Tennant deserves significant credit for this turn of events. Let us not forget that back in 2015,
the only MCU villains anyone considered worth a darn were Loki, fellow Netflix baddie Wilson Fisk,
and Tennant's Kilgrave, oft-referred to in the comics as the Purple Man.
As Kilgrave, Tennant inverts the quirky charm he wields as the Doctor and stuffs
it into a sociopath that Jessica Jones combats throughout the latter two-thirds of the season.
Kilgrave ceases to be a series regular following the initial 13 episodes, however,
and while we'd like to make a case that Kilgrave's exit doesn't serve the show's
larger story and other characters, we can't. Despite the quality of Tennant's performance,
"Jessica Jones" made the right call in keeping Kilgrave out of its second season.
But, in an alternate-universe scenario where the folks in charge of the MCU decided to do more
stuff with Kilgrave, Marvel fans would probably be talking about David Tennant more often. And
we've seen comic book characters come back from worse, so we've still got our fingers crossed!
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