Countdown to Thirteen: Final Thoughts

Again, spoilers for the identity of the Thirteenth Doctor.  If you’ve somehow made it this far not knowing, hide under a rock until Sunday.  You’re almost there!

I haven’t seen everything that Jodie Whittaker has been in, but I’ve seen everything I could reasonably get my hands on, and since we’re less than a week away from her debut as the Thirteenth Doctor, I wanted to do a quick wrap-up on my tour through her filmography.

Although I’m still digesting my overall thoughts, one thing that strikes me about Whittaker’s film and TV career is that a lot of it feels fairly insubstantial.  There’s no question that she’s a strong actress – look no further than her work in Venus or on Broadchurch or The Assets for proof of that – but she’s been in a lot of projects that ask very little of her talents.

Not that there’s anything extraordinary in that.  I’ve worked my way through enough actors’ filmographies to know that everyone has nothing roles on their resumes.  I haven’t gotten very far into my Andrew Rannells reviews yet, but I’ve already seen a lot of his work, and I know he has some parts in there that aren’t worth his time.  Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a certified leading man who’s either the star or costar of most things I’ve seen him in, and that includes some undemanding lead roles that he could’ve easily slept through.  And Whittaker’s predecessor on Who, Peter Capaldi, the actor who kicked off this blog to start with, has had all sorts of thankless parts in movies or TV episodes, the roles that made him consider giving up acting before he snagged The Thick of It.  Lean parts are nothing new.

However, while Whittaker has some insubstantial bit parts and larger roles in bad projects, she also has some sizable roles in shows or films that are perfectly solid, but that screentime and overall quality doesn’t always translate to complexity for her character.  By and large, for instance, I like Attack the Block, and Whittaker does well enough in it, but there’s not a lot to interest me in her character.  With this and other roles, they’re blandly written or underwritten, and there isn’t much for a performer to work with - she has the most prominent female role in Good Vibrations, Get Santa, and Black Sea (ha!), but there's so little to say about any of these characters or her performances of them.

Even though there’s a decent variety of projects here – the unsettling mystery of Broadchurch, the cracked comedy of Perrier’s Bounty, the period drama of Cranford – and even though Whittaker’s most deeply-drawn characters have allowed me to see some of her emotional range, I still feel like I don’t fully know what she’s capable of as an actress.  And I do think sexism plays a part in that.  Not that strong roles for women are nonexistent, obviously that isn’t true, but 1) women have fewer roles available to them than men do overall, and 2) the roles they do have available to them include a lower percentage of complex, compelling characters. 

That angers/annoys me on Whittaker’s behalf.  I haven’t seen much of anything in her filmography that lets me see the Doctor in her, and that’s disappointing, because it means how many talented actresses (or other marginalized performers) could’ve been amazing Doctors that we’ll never see because they never had roles to let people see they were capable of it?  At the same time, though, that makes me all the more eager to see her Doctor, because I want her to have the chance to show off what she can do.  In terms of tone, emotion, and even just plain genre, the Doctor is a role with colossal range all by itself, and I’m ready to see Whittaker tackle that; I’m glad her past work with Chris Chibnall made him recognize how much more there is to her talents than we’ve been able to see so far.