Peter Capaldi has opened up about his departure from Doctor Who back in 2017, admitting that he wasn’t sure he wanted to take the show in the direction which was being suggested at the time.
Capaldi was speaking during an interview for 100 Questions with Tom Simons, when he was asked why he decided to stop playing the Doctor.
“I just wasn’t sure that it was going to go in the direction that I… everybody was leaving that I’d worked with,” he said. “Everybody was leaving. Jenna [Coleman] had gone, and Steven [Moffat] was going, and Brian [Minchin], the producer, was going, and those are the people that make it work for you.”
Capaldi added: “We’d had some talks about the direction. I wasn’t sure that that was where I wanted to go with the show. And I also thought, I’m not sure I could come up with anything new.”
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Capaldi also spoke about filming his regeneration scene, calling the experience “very sad”, but saying that the idea of a regeneration has been “diminished” due to the number of them that have now taken place.
“To be perfectly honest, I think there are too many regenerations,” he said. “I love all the Doctors, but I’ve lost count now of how many of them there are, so the weight of this kind of regeneration is diminished.
“Whereas when I grew up as a kid, the first time it happened it was: ‘What just happened there?’ It was mysterious and strange. It holds the mystery of the show, the regeneration.”
Capaldi added that regeneration is “one of the key tenets of the show” and that it attracts people in an “almost subconscious” way, because it sees the central character die and be reborn.
“That doesn’t happen in any other show,” he said. “But they have to be taken right to the edge, so it’s a very, very powerful death motif.”
When Simons suggested this was surprisingly morbid for a family show, Capaldi said: “It is, but it’s magical. It’s magical, and that’s wherein lies the magic of the show.”
This isn’t the first time Capaldi has spoken about his Doctor Who experience in recent months – he previously admitted he felt the show has suffered from issues of scale, becoming “very, very big” when it was “never like that when I loved it.”
“It became a different thing,” he told Half the Picture. “I think the responsibilities of playing the part became more… there were more of them. There were more things that you had to do rather than just… I mean, I think in the old days, if you were Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker or something like that, you spend most of your year making it and then a bit of your year promoting it.
“But it wasn’t this in-your-face kind of thing that suddenly was really important to the BBC, or suddenly really important to a brand that had to be maintained.
“It was just a show that some kids really loved, and other kids didn’t care about, but wanted to watch football, or you grew out of. It became this sort of very important thing – I think less in a cultural way and more in an economic way.”
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Following his tenure as the Doctor, Capaldi has starred in multiple projects, including James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, Netflix’s Black Mirror and Prime Video’s Devil’s Hour. He has most recently appeared in the second season of Apple TV drama Criminal Record.
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