David Tennant‘s Spies of Warsaw aired its first installment on BBC America last night, and so naturally he’s doing some press rounds, so naturally everybody’s asking him about Doctor Who, because nobody is really over that either. Naturally. Here are his thoughts on the Olympics:
“I waited and waited for the call, but nobody got in touch.”
I believe there was an online petition to get me to carry the torch. I don’t know how many people signed it, and I don’t know what happened to it. Either it never made it to the London organizing committee, or they chose to ignore it. Nobody ever called me up, so I wasn’t involved. There was going to be a little Doctor Who montage in the opening ceremony, but I believe it was cut just before. So, even that small contribution was cruelly robbed from me.
Mr. Tennant, we were all robbed. In fact, the reason why the rest of the ceremony was so incredibly geeky was to distract Tumblr from the fact that you didn’t show up. But if you’re interested in more Who info, you should know that Tennant does still have a sonic screwdiver, but he wasn’t able to get away with a wand from the set of Harry Potter:
I have a sonic screwdriver. In fact, I have a little box of Doctor Who things that were presented to me, with a sonic screwdriver and a stethoscope and TARDIS key. I don’t think I’ve ever taken anything I wasn’t supposed to. I can’t remember doing that. I would have quite liked a Harry Potter wand, but they were very closely guarded. That’s quite a well-oiled machine. I can’t think of anything else that I’ve got. Oh, I’ve got one very special thing. When I was first with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995, I played Touchstone, the jester in As You Like It, and I’ve still got the little stick that jesters have with the head on the end. I don’t know what they’re called, but I’ve got the one that I had as Touchstone. It was beautifully made, with a little leather handle and a Mr. Punch type face.
But surely somebody must be interested in his current work, even though it doesn’t involve time travel.
Jean-Francois Mercier is the French military attaché to Warsaw, in the late 1930s. He’s part of that diplomatic world, in and out of the French embassy in Warsaw. But, he’s also got a clandestine life. He’s a career soldier, so he’s been used by his Paris bosses to learn what might be going on. Europe is a bit of a melting pot, at that time. Poland is right in the middle, between Germany and Russia. As tensions accelerate, there’s a lot of intelligence to be gathered, so Mercier does a fair bit of snooping around and finding out what’s going on. Very quickly, in our story, he uncovers some evidence that the Germans are planning to invade, in the very near future, and not just Poland, but France. And he takes that back to his Paris masters, to be met with no small sense of incredulity.
…It’s a story of his sense of duty coming up against his sense of what’s right and what needs to be done, but it’s also a love story. He falls in love with Anna Skarbek [Janet Montgomery], who he meets in Poland, and it’s about them getting together through all that’s going on in Europe, at the time. It’s a good, old-fashioned spy story. It’s set in this incredibly rich time. It’s a world you can really immerse yourself in, and that gives a wonderful setting for this story. And it’s just a really good story. It’s a good, strong tale to tell.
To read the entire interview, visit Collider here.
