As the BBC series bids farewell to the 10th doctor, Tennant talks of his NBC pilot ‘Rex Is Not Your Lawyer’ and his delight ‘to be going out with such a bang.’

For another two weeks, David Tennant is still the space-time-traveling Doctor in ” Doctor Who,” the British sci-fi series that airs here on BBC America. After a year in which the show appeared only sporadically, as a series of “specials,” the end of the Tennant tenancy arrives all in a rush: “The Waters of Mars,” his penultimate adventure, premieres tonight, with the two-part finale, “The End of Time,” beginning Dec. 26. By the end of Part 2, which airs Jan. 2 — and this is not a spoiler — he will have died and regenerated into the form of his replacement, Matt Smith.

And yet in some strange quantum mechanical way, he is also already not the Doctor, having filmed his last scenes some months back. And even as he is and is not the Doctor, he is (possibly) becoming someone else, the eponymous star of an NBC pilot called “Rex Is Not Your Lawyer,” in which he plays an attorney who coaches clients to represent themselves after he begins suffering panic attacks.

We spoke by telephone on a recent rainy day in Los Angeles. (“I can understand it’s a novelty here,” he said, “but I watched the news last night and it sounded like the world was coming to an end.”) Of “Rex,” which also features Jane Curtin and Jeffrey Tambor, he would only say, because “I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say,” that “it’s a great part. It’s a very dramatic role, it’s quite funny — you get to do a bit of everything and that always appeals.”

Doing a bit of everything is the very essence of “Doctor Who,” which revolves between comedy, tragedy, horror, suspense, melodrama, farce and satire from episode to episode and even from moment to moment. Tall, thin and energetic, with a face that fits two definitions of foxy, Tennant has played the Doctor as a swashbuckling clown with issues, a man whose response to his survivor’s guilt — he’s not only a Time Lord, but he’s the last — is to randomly roam space and time, running toward life, and away from it. The Doctor contains multitudes, and multitudes have contained him — Tennant is the 10th actor to have played him since the series began in 1963, following Christopher Eccleston (the first to play the character after the show’s 16-year hiatus) into the role at the end of 2005.

He was working with writer Russell T. Davies and executive producer Julie Gardner on the “Casanova” miniseries just as the two were bringing “Doctor Who” back to life. (All three are leaving the show together.)

“I was thrilled that it was back,” he said, “delighted that it was being done with such love and attention and taken so seriously by all involved. But it’s all slightly mixed up in the fact that [before the new series aired] I got shown some episodes by Russell and Julie in what I thought was just a social night, at the end of which they said, ‘And we’re also looking for someone to do it for year two.’ ”

Rather than jump at the offer, he went through “a couple of weeks of indecision. You’re being asked, in a way, to take on the expectations of your 8-year-old self, and that’s quite an undertaking. I was surprised at how difficult I found it to say yes — you had to wonder if this was a clever idea. This kind of drama was not being made in Britain at the time. We hadn’t made a science-fiction drama for I don’t know how many years, or for that kind of family audience. I knew that with Russell at the helm, it was going to be a quality product, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into something that will be taken into the nation’s heart.”

But it was, phenomenally so. “It’s been such a big hit in Britain,” said Tennant, “and every year we did it, it seemed to get bigger. And although it’s wonderful and thrilling to be part of it, you also feel the pressure of not wanting to be there when it . . . turns a corner. It’s the sort of show that takes a lot of energy and a lot of commitment and a lot of inspiration and a lot of . . . attack. You can clearly give it as much as it requires for only so long before you start repeating yourself, and I was keen to make sure we didn’t get to that point.”

When he read Davies’ final scripts, “I was nervous they would somehow disappoint, but of course they didn’t. I read them in my trailer and had a wee cry. They are so beautifully written. I was just delighted to be going out with such a bang.”

Tennant will likely next be seen on American television when “Great Performances” airs the film of his “Hamlet,” which he performed at Stratford in 2008 with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has performed with the company over the years, including as Romeo in 2000, but this was his first performance after becoming a pop-cultural action figure.

“On the opening night in Stratford, when outside my dressing room window the BBC News 24 truck pulled up, I realized that if I failed at this it was going to be on a fairly international level,” he said. But the Times called his performance “riveting throughout,” and the Guardian praised his Hamlet’s “quicksilver intelligence, mimetic vigor and wild humor” — qualities that describe his Doctor as well.

As to the how it all happened, “I’ve always sort of bumbled, to be honest; I’ve always just gone from one contract to another; I’ve been mostly fortunate that I’ve been able to join them up. And that’s all I ever really hoped for.”

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Sci-fi TV’s longest-living hero never really dies – he’s simply regenerating over the holidays

It’s the beginning of the end for Doctor Who.

Which for science-fiction television’s longest-living character (at the time of his debut in 1963, Star Trek was still three years away) always means a new beginning. When The Doctor dies, which he has already done nine times, he simply “regenerates” into a whole new actor.

For 10th Doctor David Tennant, the end is nigh, with Saturday’s TV-movie, The Waters of Mars, airing on Space at 9 p.m., leading up to his double-length swan song, End of Time, which will follow on Jan. 2 at 8.

In between, on New Year’s Day, Space repeats the recent miniseries “finale” of the somewhat grittier Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood, starting at 5 p.m., which (spoiler alert!) effectively kills off all but the two most vital members of the monster-mashing team. But in the Who-niverse, as we’ve said, death is never the end. The devastating Torchwood finale did such huge numbers in Britain that it actually brought that show (if not its actors) back from the dead, with a full 13-episode new fourth season and an (almost) all-new cast.

When Tennant’s tenure as The Doctor ends, 28-year-old English episodic actor Matt Smith jumps into the role, and on into a new fifth season (of the current run), which will also air on Space, to debut in the spring.

The relative unknown Smith was cast as the character’s 11th incarnation after a long list of more familiar names were considered and courted – Little Britain‘s David Walliams was an early favourite, and Bill Nighy was reportedly very keen, among candidates that were said to include Russell Crowe, Daniel Radcliffe, Robert Carlyle, James Nesbitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones (!?) and Tennant’s Blackpool co-star, David Morrissey, who teased fans with a twisty guest role in the 2008 episode “The Next Doctor” (itself being rebroadcast on Space Jan. 2 at 4 p.m., followed by a repeat of Planet of the Dead, the first of these last few Who TV-movies).

Meanwhile, Tennant has followed in the footsteps of House doctor Hugh Laurie and most of the British cast of Rome (which included tonight’s Who guest star, Lindsay Duncan) with his own American network series, Rex Is Not Your Lawyer, to debut on NBC this fall.

“It’s so many things, actually,” Tennant mused of his Doctor’s impending demise at the TV critics tour last summer. “It’s exciting, but it’s also very sad. It’s thrilling to be handing over the show in such good health. But we’re also … coming to the end of something very special.

“So it’s a whole mixture of emotions and probably, until they actually transmit (air), I won’t quite know how it feels. I don’t think any of us really will because we’re still sort of clinging on in there until the shows go out.”

The “we” here predominantly refers to writer/producer Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk), who is leaving the series along with Tennant to focus on Torchwood and other non-genre projects. It was Davies who rescued the Doctor franchise from cheesy kiddie-show oblivion by reinventing him as a complex contemporary character, at once gleefully eccentric and tortured and dark.

Particularly now the latter, Tennant confirms. “I think Planet of the Dead … was probably the last hurrah for the 10th Doctor in terms of his last untroubled … I mean, he was (always) in mortal danger, but he was loving it. Really, from The Waters of Mars and heading into that final story, the Sword of Damocles is dangling, I think, and that informs everything that goes on.

“He’s raging against the dying of the light. He knows that the sands of time are running out. He’s been told: the bell is tolling for him and he doesn’t want to go quietly.”

“It’s just a way of reinventing the wheel,” demurs Davies, “with this character who has been around since 1963 and yet, here we are, still managing to find a new aspect of him.

“It’s such an unusual show,” he allows, “because it’s different every week. Literally, it goes to a different place every week, and there’s a different style every week. You know, you can do a comedy episode. You can do a dark, psychological episode. You can have romps. You can have love stories. You can have adventures. Waters of Mars is a very tense, claustrophobic, trapped-in-a-submarine kind of thing. Going into the finale, it becomes a sort of personal epic …

“I always think there’s a very essential `Doctor-ness’ behind whatever he’s saying and doing. And because it’s always changing, you don’t need to worry too much about making a change.

“It’s always changing. And all we can do, really, is just hang on for the ride.”

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DR WHO star David Tennant has admitted that he could be left out in the cold if his big break in Hollywood doesn’t come off.

Tennant has the chance to make his name in the States after filming the hour-long pilot for the new US legal comedy Rex Is Not Your Lawyer in which he plays an oddball Chicago attorney at law.

But he admitted his fame in Britain could mean nothing when it comes to NBC network bosses deciding whether the pilot shows enough promise to become a full series.

Following in the footsteps of stars such as fellow-Scot Ashley Jensen as he tries to make it big across the Pond, the 38-year old from Bathgate explained: “It’s impossible to know what will happen with a pilot, especially in the American market, which is so different to ours and difficult to predict. But it will be an adventure if nothing else.

“These American shows could be very allconsuming and go on for years, or I might film my pilot and never hear a thing. So you have to roll with the punches. I never really think about possibilities. I just kind of ramble along and see what happens next and hope for the best – and that’s worked out so far.”

The eagerly awaited pair of Dr Who Christmas specials will see Tennant step aside to make way for Matt Smith, who will take over as the “regenerated” 11th incarnation of the Time Lord with two hearts.

Smith will make a brief appearance in the Christmas special, in which the Time Lord will battle arch-enemy The Master, played by John Simm.

Over the festive period, David will also guest star in Catherine Tate’s sketch show special, playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in Nan’s Christmas Carol, a spoof of the Dickens classic in which the foul-mouthed pensioner plays Scrooge.

He is set to reprise his RSC role of Hamlet, which he performed on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, for a three-hour BBC2 film.

And he stars in the Stephen Poliakoff film Glorious 39, with plans to work with comedy genius Simon Pegg, best known for classic British comedies Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz.

David said: “We’re just hoping that everything is going to work out but it’s all looking very positive. Simon’s terrific. I wouldn’t say we’re friends but we’ve certainly met and I’m a huge fan of his.”

If the acting work does ever dry up, David has a future as a game show host.

He put in some practice recently, presenting a special edition of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, where he was joined by Catherine Tate, who stars as Doctor Who sidekick Donna in the Christmas specials.

But it’s unlikely, having shown in versatility on the stage and screen.

He is currently starring alongside a largely female cast in the St. Trinians 2 film, an experience he admits was not entirely unpleasant.

“I’m the villain in St Trinian’s 2 which was just great fun,” David said. “I just didn’t know what to expect, and on the first day I’m there with Colin Firth, who is one of the funniest men, just such a lovely man. Very funny and just enjoying himself – so I took my lead from him, and we had a really good time.”

David also found the camaraderie between co-stars Rupert Everett and Firth particularly amusing between takes.

“They’ve known each other forever, so they’re like an old married couple which is sort of what they’re playing in the film – so that makes sense,” he explained.

“And the girls were such a really nice bunch, because I guess potentially if you put a bunch of late-teen, early-20s girls together in a room they are not necessarily all going to be the best of friends but this lot absolutely were – like blood sisters. They all really looked out for each other and looked after each other. It was a really lovely time. I had a ball making that film.”

One thing he has been less comfortable with is the fact that he has topped various polls as Britain’s sexiest male since taking on the role of the Doctor – the latest among women over 30.

“Oh I don’t know about that. I’m not sure about that,” he admitted. “That doesn’t make sense – 70 per cent of women voted for me and 55 per cent for Daniel Craig, so that doesn’t add up. So, flattered as I am to be at the top of any list, frankly I’m not sure that we should be trusting the maths of this one.”

As he looks back on 2009, he surveys an acting career which is in fine health – having injured his back in 2008, causing a spell on the sidelines.

David said: “This time last year I was struggling to get back on stage in Hamlet. I had to take a couple of weeks off, but I got back and finished the show and I’ve been fine ever since – thanks to some very fine surgeons.

“There’s nothing you can do when your body decides to take a break – it becomes enforced. You suddenly feel a bit mortal and maybe that’s a good lesson.

“It’s quite good when you’re playing Hamlet and you come back and feel even more mortal than you did before it happened. So perhaps that fed into the final performances and you’ll see that when it’s on TV at Christmas – a flash of my mortality.

“I’ll be everywhere over Christmas. You’ll be gorging on me but, don’t worry, I’ll go away and you won’t see me for a long time.”

David admitted there would be a feeling of loss when the Dr Who specials get aired. He almost broke down during the filming of the final scenes, so emotional was the experience after four years in control of the Tardis.

“The bell is tolling. The Doctor’s time is running out. But I’ve done it all so I know exactly what’s going to happen,” he admitted.

“To be honest, it’s exciting. We finished them in May, and they’re such good stories I’ve just been desperate for everyone to see them.

“And now I’ve seen the finished episodes and they’re sort of the best ones we’ve done, I think. It really is a big, exciting, rollicking story so I’m impatient for everyone to see them.

“The four extraordinary, rollercoaster years have flown by.. but it does feel like it’s been such a huge part of my life, and life-changing I guess. And when I think back to 2005, it feels like I’m thinking about somebody who was much more young and more naive.

“It’s sad and it’s moving, and that feels right and proper too. And it’s a big old epic story. I was a bit nervous when I got the scripts for the final stories because you’re desperate for it to feel significant and to feel like the end of something.

“Actually the scripts that Russell T Davies has written are so fantastic, so perfect. And everybody involved on the show has done such incredible work.”

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SOB! It’s not long now before we have to say goodbye to the best Doctor Who who’s ever stepped inside the Tardis – David Tennant.

But, although he will be regenerating into Matt Smith at the end of two Christmas episodes, that doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of lovely David.

No doubt he’ll pop up in plenty of other dramas, not least reprising his RSC role of Hamlet, which he performed on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, for a three-hour BBC2 film.

And if the acting work ever dries up, he has a future as a game show host. He put in some practice presenting a special edition of Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

To ease him in, it helps that David knows a couple of the guest panellists rather well.

One is Catherine Tate, who plays his Doctor Who sidekick Donna. We’ll see plenty of them over Christmas, as they both appear in the Doctor specials and David guest stars in her sketch show special, playing the Ghost of Christmas Present in Nan’s Christmas Carol, a spoof of the Dickens classic in which the foul-mouthed pensioner plays Scrooge,

Another Buzzcocks guest is Bernard Cribbins, who plays Donna’s grandfather and also features in the Doctor Who Christmas episodes.

They’re joined by Jamie Cullen, Jo Whiley and captains Phill Jupitus and Noel Fielding.

Buzzcocks: The Doctor Who Special, BBC2, Wednesday, 10pm

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