12 Things You Might Not Know About New DOCTOR WHO Lead Actor Peter Capaldi [Profile]

Peter Capaldi is the 12th Doctor on Doctor Who,  but who is he?

The name of who will play the next Time Lord of the BBC sci-fi television series Doctor Who was announced Sunday on Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor at 11 AM PT on BBC America and 7 PM in the UK on BBC One.

“There comes a right time for the right person to play it,” show runner
and executive producer Steven Moffat said. “We all had the same idea,
and it was a quite different idea.” He added that, after seeing
Capaldi’s audition tape, filmed at his house, “Everybody saw it and was
like, ‘That’s the Doctor.’”

“It’s so wonderful not to keep this secret any longer,” Capaldi, 55, said during the show. “I haven’t played Doctor Who since I was nine on the playground.”

Matt Smith
played the role of the alien Time Lord since 2010. Smith is scheduled
to appear as the 11th Doctor in the 90-minute 50th anniversary special
Nov. 23. The special will also feature the 10th Doctor, David Tennant, who took up the role from 2005. The special will be aired exactly 50 years after the first episode of Doctor Who, “The Unearthly child,” premiered in 1963.

• Capaldi was born 14 April 1958 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Sylvester McCoy, the
  Seventh Doctor, and David Tennant, the Tenth Doctor, are the only other Scottish actors to have “officially” played the Doctor.
• He was the lead singer of punk rock band, “Dreamboys,” with
  stand-up comedian turned US talk-show host Craig Ferguson as the
  drummer and Temple Clark as the bassist. “It was 1976 and punk was just
  exploding,” he says. “The worst name for any band ever – especially a
  punk band. The trouble was, we were always much more interested in
  being funny than being serious. We were the only band John Peel never
  gave a session to in Glasgow.”
• Capaldi won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film for directing his film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life
  (1995). “That was very confusing for me and a lot of people because I
  won it as an actor who was having a go at directing.” he said “Luckily,
  I had another script, over which a bidding war exploded. That’s why
  I’ve got a house in Crouch End and I’ll always be grateful to Miramax
  for buying it.” Unfortunately for him, the production of his script Moon Man
  fell through. “I thought I was going to be Ridley Scott now, or Steven
  Spielberg, and I flew over to New York to set up production and then
  they said they’re not going to do it. It was over. I had to work
  because I’d spent all my money – on the house – and I remember the
  Oscars after the Oscar I won, I was standing in mud in a field in
  Rickmansworth directing a dog food commercial.”
• He’s played a type of doctor several times in his career. He
  recently starred as a W.H.O. (World Health Organization) medical doctor
  in World War Z (2013). He played a doctor in the Jo Brand hospital sitcom Getting Over It. In 2005 he played another kind of doctor: spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the popular BBC sitcom The Thick of It.
  His character is famous for his swearing. “Instead of asking for
  autographs, people ask me to tell them to ‘F**k off’ … sometimes I
  mean it,” he says.
• Capaldi is not new to the world of Doctor Who.
  He previously portrayed marble dealer Lucius Caecilius Iucundus in the
  2008 episode “The Fires of Pompeii” when Digital Spy said he had
  “little to do apart from whimper and scowl.” He also played politician
  John Frobisher in the short lived Doctor Who spin-off serial Torchwood: Children of Earth.
• Peter Capaldi is 55-years-old, which is the second oldest actor
  to play the role. He’s the same age as the first Doctor, William
  Hartnell, when he was cast in 1963. He follows Matt Smith, who is the
  youngest actor to play the Time Lord.

• To prepare for his audition, he downloaded Doctor Who scripts from the Internet and practiced reading them in front of a mirror.
• Moffat said the actor’s name “briefly flicked through” his mind
  when casting the 11th Doctor,  but he felt it wasn’t the right time.
  Moffat added, “now that moment has arrived”.
• Capaldi was in Prague filming his role of Cardinal Richelieu in The Musketeers, a BBC1 adaptation of The Three Musketeers,
  when he  received the call he got the part. Because his phone was on
  silent, he missed it.  When he called his agent back, she answered the
  phone saying, “Hello Doctor.”
• He studied at the “Glasgow School of Art,” and has a passion
  about painting. He recently played Leonardo da Vinci, the painter,
  sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor,
  anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.
• Several lines from the leaked audition script point to his
  casting: The Doctor says, about his regenerated face, “Nice action,
  responsive. Bit less heft on the chin” which is a reverence to Matt
  Smith’s sizeable chin. At another part the Doctor says, “Have you
  changed height?” His newest companion Clara Owens (Jenna-Louise Coleman)
  responds, “It’s you, your height, you’re the one who’s changed.” Matt
  Smith is 5ft 11.5in (182 cm) while Peter is 6ft (1.83 m) tall.
• At one point people were saying he should move to America and do
  television. He disagreed saying, “The moment everybody wants you to go
  [to America] and do the pilot season – they keep saying, ‘Don’t you
  want to be Hugh Laurie?’. I mean I love Hugh Laurie but I don’t want to
  be a guy who goes to work every day for nine months of the year in a
  corner of Burbank. I really don’t. I like doing a bit here and a bit
  there and strange things, and I think that’s held me back.”
• Capaldi’s parents were in the ice-cream business. “We had a café
  that was at the bottom of the tenement that we lived in,” he says. “My
  childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some
  kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant
  life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn’t really as colourful
  that.”

Watch Doctor Who to see Capaldi make his debut as the Doctor in the year-end special later this year.

What do you think of Peter Capaldi’s casting as the Doctor on Doctor Who?

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