The Doctor Will See You Now (cont) 
(Paul Stuart)
Capaldi didn’t arrive at the start of shooting in January with a fully formed Doctor. “Sometimes I’d look in the mirror and think, that’s just me. That’s not him. But some days he'd look back and I’d try to catch it. It’s not an intellectual process, it’s just an instinctive relationship.” His character has evolved through the first few episodes.
The uniform has evolved too. Out with Smith’s tweed, in with a long black jacket, scarlet lining, black trousers, Doc Martens and a waistcoat that was, up until the 19th cardigan v waistcoat committee meeting, very nearly a cardigan. Thank goodness it wasn’t a cardie, I point out.
“It was a good cardigan,” he says, defensively. “You haven’t seen the cardigan. A cardigan doesn’t sound good, but it can look great. Tom Baker wore a cardigan.”
Settling on the final outfit took weeks and is the stuff of any man’s nightmares.
“I tried on everything anybody suggested,” he says. “We’d go to a costume house and have huge, exhausting sessions of getting dressed up. It’s fine for about 15 minutes, but by the time we’ve done 3½ hours, it’s like, get me out of this. The most ridiculous outfit, the one I loved, I looked like Count Arthur Strong with a real, old cardigan.”
He didn’t go for Count Arthur Strong. He went for a sort of magician look. “Magician look?” he says, more defensively. “I think it’s quite a hard look. I always wanted him to be in black — I always just saw the Doctor in dark colours. Not tweed. Matt’s a really young cool guy — he can wear anything, but I wanted to strip it back and be very stark.”
Many Doctor Who scholars think the plots could do with stripping back too, after the last few series have become increasingly OTT. Can we expect fewer fireworks and more drama?
“We still blow a lot of sh*t up,” he says. “That’s very important, but it’s going to be a bit different from what we’ve seen over recent years. A bit more gravity. Some situations are more sombre and I think there are more rooted dramatic scenes. Over the past two or three years, which I’ve loved, there has often been a breathless vigour; we still have that attack, but we have another level of drama, another tone. And the scenes are longer.”
Capaldi was in Prague shooting The Musketeers when his agent called to say he’d got the part. He spent the afternoon wandering around the city, humming the Doctor Who theme tune. “I just didn’t think it was something that would happen to me.”
He had to keep his big secret from everyone but his wife and his 21-year-old daughter for the next 10 weeks. This is when you would have found him at Forbidden Planet, amusing himself and only himself. But he didn’t say yes to the part immediately. “I didn’t want to be Doctor Who in a Doctor Who I didn’t like. I had to be convinced the show was going in a direction I was interested in. I had to think carefully about the level of visibility. My life was blessed, but as soon as this happened I had paparazzi outside my house. People spoke to me before and recognised me, but nothing like this. I had to decide if I was ready to live with that, because once that genie is out of the bottle, it doesn’t go back in.”
Not that he was ever going to say no. “I thought, ‘You’ve loved this since you were a kid, how can you not be Doctor Who?’ ”
It would, however, be wrong to say Capaldi was always destined to play the part. His life has been too mercurial to allow anything approaching destiny, as a quick time travel back through his CV demonstrates. He stole the show in 2011 as the obsessive-compulsive BBC executive Randall Brown in The Hour. He won awards as the profanity-spouting Malcolm Tucker in 2005. But before that he spent a full year out of work, a defaulting mortgage on the immediate horizon. His wife, Elaine Collins, a producer, kept the wolves from the unemployed actor’s door. What went wrong that year?
“I don’t know,” he says. “In the same way I didn’t know why I started to work again the next year. That was one of the key learning points in my life. I hadn’t done anything different. I didn’t start writing letters or putting myself out in the world. I didn’t start attending parties. I didn’t pull myself together. This work just started coming in and I thought, I have no control over this.”
Before that and before years as a jobbing TV actor (a transvestite in Prime Suspect here, a Songs of Praise producer in the Vicar of Dibley there), he won an Oscar in 1995 for writing and directing Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a short film starring Richard E Grant doing a Withnailish Kafka struggling to start The Metamorphosis. Hollywood beckoned for long enough to meet those malevolent forces in Armani suits, but it was not to be.
“There are so many films I’ve tried to get made,” he says. “They’ve collapsed for one reason or another, so why carry on? Your whole existence has to be about that, and even when you eventually get your film made because of the attraction of the two-star review, what do you do then? I respect it, but I’d rather have fun.”
Which brings us to the early years — not the 15-year-old writing to the Radio Times to share his love of the Doctor, but after that, when, as he puts it, it was “time to get into sex and drugs and rock’n’roll”. After Capaldi failed to get into drama school, he applied successfully for a place at the Glasgow School of Art. There, he became the lead singer of a punk band which began life as Bastards of Hell and soon changed its name to the Dreamboys. His drummer was Craig Ferguson, who now hosts the Late Late Show in the US. They toured, they cut an album, they put on drag acts in Glasgow clubs at Christmas (“it was more panto than drag”). They even shared a venue with U2 (“I don’t think we supported them, but we somehow got involved”).
In Ferguson’s bestselling autobiography, the account of his days in the band is thick with nostalgia. “Peter and Roddy [the guitarist] and I took acid or mushrooms together, got drunk, endured hangovers together,” he writes. “We never seemed to have any money and were always dirty, cold and uncomfortable, and I loved it.”
He portrays Capaldi as a born performer, tall, very thin and very handsome, with thick carrotty hair, eyeliner and, on their first meeting, “talking to some excited girls who seemed to be fighting over the right to inhale smoke from his menthol cigarette”.
So was Capaldi really a fully fledged pop star with groupies and everything?
“Well, Craig was great,” he says, “but he was from Cumbernauld so he thought Glasgow was a metropolis. None of us were pop stars... we had no money. No one signed us and we were never on the telly.”
We will never know if the Dreamboys’ big break was just around the corner because Capaldi got his own break at 21. Returning to his flat one night after a gig, he found the film director Bill Forsyth chatting to his costume designer landlady in the hall (“an extraordinary piece of fate”). Half an hour later, he’d landed a part in the film Local Hero, starring Burt Lancaster. Ferguson went off into drug and alcohol addiction. Capaldi gave up the booze, the drugs and the eyeliner to become an actor. Would he have followed the full Johnny Rotten arc from anarchy to butter adverts if it hadn’t been for that break?
“I’d have liked that, but it was just getting too tough,” he says. “It was getting hard to be so unsuccessful. The great thing about being in a band is that you create your own world, your own kind of palette, but I don’t know if I had the stamina to hang on in there.”
The rest is history. Or the future, depending on the direction in which we’re time travelling. Whichever it is, we have reached the point in the day when Capaldi swaps T-shirt and jeans for the full Doctor. On goes the waistcoat, the DMs, the magician’s jacket. On too goes the signet ring, specially constructed to hide his wedding band, which he doesn’t ever like to take off. (“I see you don’t have a wedding ring,” he says, in a tone so gently disapproving that I decide I’ll buy one on the way home. “Very modern.”)
As he changes, a strange thing happens. He’s not on set and our camera is clicking rather than rolling, but his whole body language transforms. By the time he’s got all the clobber on, he's grown beyond his 5ft 9in. His eyes are firing lasers around the studio and, well, he’s no longer the very relaxed, very happy Glaswegian will-o-the-wisp. He’s a full-on Gallifreyan nutjob. But in a good way.
“Do you feel like the Doctor now?” I ask.
“I do,” he replies, twirling. “I do.”
“Are the twirls a punk thing?”
“It’s graphic shapes,” he says, twirling some more. “That’s why being in black is so great. You can make these spidery shapes. It’s like German expressionism or Sixties caricatures. They’re very graphic lines.”
We have 27 days to wait to see if his German expressionist Doctor, the one conjured from a book of thoughts and half a lifetime of enthusiasm, is a success. Today, I’ve had a sneak preview. I’ve seen the madness behind the eyes, and the joy too. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t become the most compelling Doctor to date. For now though, he’s back to his T-shirt and jeans. He leaves quietly, via the stairs, not a Police Box.
Doctor Who returns to BBC1 on Saturday August 23www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1435733.ece#next 
to watch these videos and still say he didn't deserve the part of the Doctor. 
