Two years ago, Jodie Whittaker told me she was considering doing comedy. Before Doctor Who, she had played countless roles that required her to be “on the brink of trauma”: a whistleblowing nurse in Trust Me, a grieving mother in Broadchurch, the wife of a jealous husband in Black Mirror. We were speaking in 2021, a few weeks after she’d filmed her last scenes as the Doctor. Doctor Who had a bit of everything, but she’d never done pure comedy before. Maybe it was time to try something different.
Now it’s 2023 and Whittaker is back on our screens. She is now starring in Time as Orla, a mother-of-three imprisoned, harshly, for “fiddling the leccy”, who finds herself stuck in a spiralling nightmare as her life falls apart in the system. And soon she will appear as Tess in One Night, a dream-like Australian drama about sexual assault, memory and trauma. After watching both series back-to-back, it’s fair to say neither is a barrel of laughs. “Oh, yeah,” she chortles. “I really took my own note and ran with that one.”
