The BBC News website interviews David Tennant, preparing to defend the Earth from alien invasion in a special Christmas edition of sci-fi series Doctor Who.

In his first full episode as the Doctor, Tennant barely has time to change out of his pyjamas before he is hunted by robot Santas, a lethal spinning Christmas tree and bloodthirsty Sycorax aliens.

It brings to an end a busy year for Tennant, who won acclaim in dramas Blackpool and The Quatermass Experiment, took the lead in Casanova and ITV thriller Secret Smile and joined blockbuster movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Tennant's breakthrough came after he graduated from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

Small parts in acclaimed productions such as the 1996 movie Jude led to larger roles in films including Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things.

He also appeared on stage in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Romeo and Juliet, The Rivals and The Comedy of Errors, and was nominated for a best actor Laurence O…

It's 1975 in Paisley. A little boy is playing in his garden, and he's excited because his granny has knitted him a really, really long scarf that makes him look just like Doctor Who. He wants to be the Doctor when he grows up. In fact, he tells everyone, he will be the Doctor when he grows up. It's just a little boy's dream. Harmless, really.
Fast-forward to 2005 in Cardiff. A grown-up man is excited because he has just seen the new Cybermen for the first time. He is playing Doctor Who in the new series, and is telling everyone it's the most thrilling thing that has happened to him ever, ever. It was all a little boy's dream. A dream that came true.
Even David Tennant can't believe the story sometimes: the boyhood fantasy being lived out 30 years later. When he talks about his new job, he rabbit-drums his feet on the floor and rubs his hands through his hair so it frizzes up like electric wiring. "It's reeeaaallly exciting," he says. "Ap…

Source: Radio Times December 2005

When I was a boy, I wasn't interested in sport and I did't follow any football team, so it was posters of Madonna that I stuck on my bedroom wallss, although I certainly didn't think of her as a role model. I suppose the person who influenced me the most was Moira Robertson, my English teacher at Paisley Grammar School. She made me realise the possibilities of great literature - the work of JD Sallinger and Harper Lee, of Orwell and Arthur Miller. And it was Moira who first guided me towards a dim understanding of what Shakespeare could be about.

Both my parents were important in giving me a strong moral sense, but I think it was my father who taught me how to cope with having a public persona - quite an asset if you want to be an acto. As the minister of the parish church, he was a huge public figure in the area and I admired his ease, his joie de vivre and his way with words.
Now I'm older, I still get a tremendous thrill when I meet actors who have been role models …

Let's start at the very beginning. How did you get into the acting business?I just always wanted to do it, from before I really knew what it was! I just decided, at a very young age, that that was what I was going to do. And my parents weren't very sure of the idea because, y'know, I was very small and why should they imagine I'd stick with it? But I did and it hasn't changed since then.
What's your training been?
I went to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and di three years in conjuction with Glasgow University, which means that I've actually got a degree from Glasgow University, even though we only did one day a week there. So that was my training. Went in at 17, came out at 20, and have been doing it ever since. What was your first job after you finished your training?
My first job after drama school was The Resistable Rise Of Arturo Ui, a Brecht play, and that wasw on a tour with 7:84 Scottish People's Theatre - to give them their full titl…

Although I've seen lots of her films and am a great admirer of what she does, the little shrine in my head is to Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. I must have been in my late teens when I first saw Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961); I certainly fell in love with her so I must have been old enough to be having those sorts of feelings. She has such an iconic look: the little black dress, the cigarette holder and the coquettish grin.

It's a proper piece of good acting rather than the sort of slightly frothy romcom performance we often saw her do elsewhere. She brings that delicate, demure, butter-wouldn't-melt quality to every part, and suddenly she's playing this character who is quite dark and a bit of a loony. Yet she carries it off so assuredly you'd sell your children to get to spend some time with Holly Golightly, even though you're aware she'd be a highmaintenance nightmare. Hepburn makes her utterly alluring and fascinating. It's one of the great …

What are you reading in bed?
I've just started a book called Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan. It's about the 1919 Paris peace treaty. That's quite posh, I realise. I've developed a penchant in recent years for sort of... a friend of mine describes them as 'dull books about dead people'.

What book have you been meaning to read but haven't got round to yet?
Hundreds.

Ulysses for instance?
Read it, moved on. No, I've always thought Ulysses might be too far up its own bum.

What is the soundtrack to your life right now?
Right now, The Killers' new album Hot Fuss. The Streets' latest album. I resisted for a while, I got the first album and it was a bit the same " sorry. So I didn't bother getting the second one, but everyone kept telling me to give it a chance and now I love it, it's fantastic. The new U2 album " still playing that quite a lot. Damien Rice for more mellow moments, since I saw Closer.

Did you like that film?
I think it's…

The world's most famous womaniser meant little to Blackpool star David Tennant until he arrived in Manchester.
"To be honest, I didn't really know much about Casanova," confesses the Scottish-born actor, who played Det Insp Carlisle in the BBC1 "Las Vegas of the North" drama.
But David soon got up to speed while filming the title role in Casanova (BBC3, 10pm Sunday), a new three-part series shot in and around Manchester and on location in Dubrovnik and Venice.
Produced by the city's Red Production Company, in association with Granada, the script is by Manchester-based Russell T Davies.
"My first experience of him was reading Russell's script," explains David, 33, "which wasn't what I was expecting. In the script he's not a lothario and he's not really a ladies' man. He's just someone who's passionate about the women he's passionate about. He's not sneaky or conniving or dishonest to any of them.
"O…

For a show the tabloids have billed as a “sizzling bonkfest”, there’s not much nudity in it, is there? David Tennant, the BBC’s new Casanova, takes this as a complaint. “No,” he laughs, rubbing his palms in mock salaciousness, “but there’s lots of sex.” While relieved that not too much of his whippet-thin body would be bared in the three-part drama, he fretted that a decorous approach to the sex might be dull without “a bit of bum now and again” — but now he is pleased they did it that way. “When you start looking at actresses’ tits, it becomes a different thing — this way, it’s fun.”
Like most actors, Tennant is regularly mortified by the prospect of explicit love scenes, but the action here happens under corsets, behind canopies, beneath skirts: a rompy, rather than erotic, affair. The worst bit, for him, was a flashback sequence of remembered encounters (the older, reminiscing Casanova is played by Peter O’Toole), including quickies with elderly ladies. One of them was at least 70,…

Sitting on the bus the other day, actor David Tennant got a fright. Looming above him as he gazed out of the window was a billboard with a giant photograph of himself.

He was draped by two women and looking smoulderingly at the bus passengers as if he'd love to rip their knickers off.

There's one of these posters as you come out of Bristol on the Wells Road, and they're popping up all over the place - a bit like the 33-year-old actor: a role in the new Harry Potter movie, heaps of praise and award nominations for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre, a star role in the recent BBC musical drama Blackpool, and now baring his all for art in the Beeb's new big glossy biopic Casanova in March.

The three-part drama, portraying Casanova as an "18th-century Jeffrey Archer", rather than randy, womanising misogynist, is getting a big build-up - as the crop of billboards prove.

"It was 20 feet high!" David gasps, recalling his firs…

From Casanova to Harry Potter via the Edinburgh stage: a new Scots star rises.
By Mark Fisher

Whatever you may think of Giacomo Casanova, the world’s most notorious seducer, you would not expect him to be the son of a former moderator of the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. A seedy misogynist, maybe. A non-conforming lover of women, possibly. But the offspring of the former minister of a Renfrewshire parish church, definitely not. Still, David Tennant is unfazed at the prospect of squirming through the sex scenes as he settles down with his father to watch himself in the BBC’s Casanova drama this March. “The sex was fun,” laughs Tennant with his big, broad grin. “It was a romp. There’s not a lot of gratuitous nudity, but there’s lots of skirts, bustiers and corsets — and that’s just me!”
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Today the tall 33-year-old is unshaven and his floppy blond hair is more wayward than usual, but there’s no disguising the high cheekbones and good looks that help…

On stage or screen, David Tennant is a favourite with writers because of his ability to go from nerdy cop to handsome lover 'in just one moment'. Elisabeth Mahoney finds him taking yet another direction - revving up to play the classic angry young man in a new Edinburgh production
Saturday January 1, 2005
The Guardian

David Tennant has an intense, boyish look. I can see him scurrying past the window of the cafe where we're due to meet. Against the backdrop of a drab winter's day in north London, he cuts an unmistakably Scottish figure - recalling Sir Henry Raeburn's painting The Reverend Robert Walker Skating On Duddingston Loch.
Not a sexy image - one entirely at odds with last year's outing as the lovestruck Detective Peter Carlisle in Blackpool, and his next TV role as Casanova. On screen, in Bright Young Things, and on stage, in Michael Boyd's Romeo And Juliet for the RSC, he smouldered. In person, or at least through pane glass, he seems more, well, co…