David Tennant’s transformation into the poisoned Russian Alexander Litvinenko was so good that he even fooled himself.
The 51-year-old from Bathgate will be seen in a drama about the Russian defector who was poisoned with polonium-210 and claimed President Vladimir Putin was behind it.
Before his death in November 2006 a photo was released of him on his deathbed which is instantly recognisable.
For new four-part series Litvinenko, David recreated the hospital bed photo of Litvinenko, bald and attached to electro-cardiogram sensors.
David said: “One of the first things we did was recreate the image of him in the hospital bed which went all around the world
“That involved a lot of very skilled people helping to recreate that image. The make-up and the prosthetics and the costume team staring at photographs to figure out, ‘What is that hospital gown and where is it arranged?’
“It took several hours.
“When we got that image and I saw it on a laptop screen, for a second you couldn’t quite tell if you were looking at the original or what we had just done.”
Doctor Who star David has become something of a chameleon of late. He looked uncannily like serial killer Dennis Nilsen in 2020 series Des.
Litvinenko is now streaming on new service ITVX.
The ex-Russian Federal Security Services and KGB officer’s death triggered one of the most complex and dangerous investigations in the history of the Metropolitan Police.
The drama will follow the New Scotland Yard officers Clive Timmons, played by Mark Bonnar, and Brent Hyatt, played by Neil Maskell, who worked to prove who was responsible for the death of Litvinenko, tracking down the two Russians who’d poisoned him with a highly toxic radioactive substance.
Litvinenko’s wife Marina, played by Margarita Levieva, also fought tirelessly to persuade the British Government to publicly name her husband’s killers and acknow-ledge the role of the Russian state in his murder.
David remembered the famous photo of Alexander “Sasha” Litvinenko in the hospital bed .
He said: “It all felt so implausible at first, like something from a James Bond film. It didn’t feel like something that happened in the real world. And that alarming, striking image of him was so powerful.”
It was why David was happy to spend hours in make-up and costume to get him looking like Litvinenko on his death bed.
He explained: “When people hear his name, that’s the image that comes into most of our minds. Of that wasting body in a hospital bed.
“We had to get that right. Whether other characters look like their real life versions doesn’t really influence the telling of the story.
“But that image of Alexander Litvinenko that bounced around the world, that attracted the world’s attention, is so vivid and is iconic, if that is an appropriate term to use for something that is about a real human tragedy. We had to get that image right.”
Once David’s dark mop of hair was hidden under a bald cap, the green gown was moved around his shoulders and the wires put on, the Scot had a glimpse of what the Russian must have felt.
He said: “It felt incredibly bleak lying there. The act of getting into the bed and getting all of the wires attached, the heart monitor, the hospital gown arranged in the correct way…it was quite a palaver. So at the beginning of a scene I’d get into the bed and just stay there.”
The hospital scenes took a week to film.
The father-of-five is a force-of-nature but when he wasn’t filming, rather than having a laugh with the cast and crew as well as staying in the bed, he didn’t want to muck about.
He said: “I felt a responsibility not to be larking around.
“While you are representing that memory, I felt I had to just go to a quiet place. So I would get in the bed and I would just stay there. I would try and find the stillness.”
David also met Litvinenko’s widow Marina, who shared a lot of family photographs.
He said: “Marina is a remarkable human. The person this had made her. She is the hero of this in many ways.
“Presumably having seen what happened to her husband she must be, on some level, nervous for herself. But when you meet her all you get is this extraordinary woman who just wants to shout about this as loudly as she can for the rest of her life.”
There are no recordings of Litvinenko talking English, apart from a couple of sentences, but lots of him talking Russian. David doesn’t speak Russian but was helped by Fabien Enjalric with phrases and finding a Russian accent when speaking English that sounds authentic.
British officials solved the murder of Litvinkenko in 2007 discovering a “hot” teapot at London’s Millennium Hotel and calling it a “state-sponsored” assassination by Russian security services. The police charged former Russian spy Andrei Lugovoy, who met Litvinenko on November, 2006, at the hotel with Dmitry Kovtun – a KGB agent – the day officials believe the lethal dose of polonium-210 was administered.
Russia refused to extradite main suspect Lugovoy. An inquest was began in 2011 into the death and in 2016 the report found Litvinenko was killed by Lugovoi and Kovtun “probably approved” by Putin.
Meanwhile in 2007 his widow Marina registered a complaint against the Russian Federation in the European Court of Human Rights and, in September 2021, a chamber of the court found Russia responsible and ordered the country to pay 100,000 euros in damages.
David said: “We were right in the middle of filming when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was responsible.
“A crime like this would not be committed without Vladimir Putin’s say-so and knowledge.
“There’s a famous line where Putin dismisses the whole business and says he’s gone, he’s not Lazarus. But if we can achieve anything with telling this story it’s to allow him to be Lazarus.
“To keep him rising from the dead and pointing the finger and not letting this be forgotten.
“He was appalled and terrified about what was happening to this country he loved. He couldn’t look away and that was why he was ultimately assassinated.
“You wonder how you would behave in circumstances like that? Would you have that courage? Would you be that brave?
“I don’t know that I would.”
David, who will be back as the Fourteenth Doctor next year, 13 years after leaving Doctor Who as the Tenth Doctor, added: “On a purely personal level it’s something I’m very proud to have done.
“I feel like we gave it our best shot and we are, hopefully, honouring the memory of Sasha and the life’s work of Marina.”
● Litvinenko is streaming now on ITVX.
