Profile: Matt Smith

The youngest-ever star of Doctor Who is a former footballer and a would-be screenwriter. And now Hollywood beckons

Matt Smith is not your typical leading man. Even his Doctor Who co-star Karen Gillan says, “Everything about him is just a bit weird.” He’s tall, yes, but thin as a rake, so he’s not the most obvious choice as the star of a Saturday night drama. And yet, as The Doctor, he has turned his distinctive features to his advantage: it’s not hard to convince viewers that he really is a super-sentient alien time-traveller with two hearts.

When Smith was announced in January 2009 as the eleventh Doctor, viewers didn’t know what to make of him. David Tennant was a hard act to follow: handsome enough to have Casanova on his CV, he had made the part his own. Benedict Cumberbatch once told me he’d batted away the notion of trying to step into Tennant’s shoes, taking on Sherlock Holmes instead.

Matt Smith had no such fears. He threw himself into the role with such physical intensity and raw charisma that he became the first Doctor to be nominated for a Bafta. “I’ve never met someone so focused,” Karen Gillan, told ShortList magazine. “His approach to acting is really creative. Rather than just reeling off the lines, he changes it every time.”

And yet he is only an actor by default. As The Doctor would tell you, there is an infinite number of parallel universes, and in most of them Smith is a professional centre-back on even more than the £200,000-plus a year the BBC reportedly pays him, employing his gangly height to nod the ball to safety.

In this universe, however, Smith’s career in Nottingham Forest and Leicester City’s youth teams was cut short at 16 by a back injury. His doting father, the boss of a plastics company, ferried him to Leicester for treatment every day for a year, but Smith never fully recovered.

Even now, Smith says, he is never overawed by famous directors or actors, but he turns to jelly in the presence of a footballing great. “I saw Drogba at an awards thing,” he told the Daily Mail recently. “Martin Scorsese was on the other side of the room, but I was like, ‘Wow, that is actually Didier Drogba.’”

And he still derives inspiration from the game. “There’s supposed to be this divide between art and physical culture,” he said in a Radio Times interview, “but I look at someone like Zinedine Zidane and I see the pure expression of artistic grace. The courage needed to be a great sportsman applies equally to art in general and acting in particular.”

A schoolteacher encouraged Smith to study drama at A Level and he went on to join the National Youth Theatre and study drama and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. The fearless way he threw himself into his roles, as he might tackle a striker, got him noticed. An agent signed him even before he’d taken his finals.

Until 2008, Smith was still playing teenagers: he acted in The History Boys at the National Theatre, and won rave reviews in the Polly Stenham play That Face. And then, suddenly, he was playing a 900-year-old Time Lord.

Smith was still only 26 when he became The Doctor, the youngest ever. He’s turned it into a plus – on him, tweed jackets and bow ties look more chic than geek. In real life he favours rock T-shirts, which he accessorises with a model girlfriend.

He met Daisy Lowe, now 22, after he confessed in an interview to having a crush on her. One of the perks of fame. The nine-month, 12-hour-a-day shoots in Cardiff for each Doctor Who series don’t leave much time for romance, however.

When he and Lowe are together, Smith finds cooking “therapeutic” – though it takes him three hours to make a spaghetti bolognese, he says, so he tends to leave it to Lowe. Or, less domestically, the young couple might go to the Coachella Festival in California, bump into actress Jaime Winstone, TV presenter Alexa Chung and Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, and take an impromptu road trip via the Joshua Tree National Park to Las Vegas. As you do.

On that trip, last summer, Smith discovered that he loves America. And now America loves him back. The current season of Doctor Who won BBC America’s highest ever ratings. When he appeared at this summer’s Comic-Con, America’s giant fantasy and science-fiction convention, the queues stretched round the block.

Smith taps into a particular brand of Britishness that appeals to Americans: eccentric, bumbling, intelligent, more likely to challenge a woman to chess than make a pass at her. Smith might have modelled his Doctor on the famous photograph in which Einstein playfully sticks out his tongue, but Americans are more likely to think of him as a younger, livelier, space-age Hugh Grant.

Just before he left on this promotional tour, Smith told the Daily Mirror: “I’m going over to Los Angeles this week to dip my head in the pond. I’m going to be having loads of meetings with film people and that sort of stuff.”

Yet Smith also seems to have ambitions beyond acting. To prepare for Doctor Who, he wrote sample stories; when he played Christopher Isherwood in a BBC drama earlier this year, he kept a daily diary. “I’ve never really shown anyone things I’ve written,” he says. “I’ve got to get over that, if I want to be a writer!”

So what’s next for our Matt? He’s just finished filming Bert and Dickie, a film for the BBC about two Brits who took rowing gold in the 1948 Olympics. He has hinted that he’d love to be cast as a Macbeth. But for the time being, it’s still not so much what, as Who.

The last episodes of the sixth series have been rolling to a sensational climax, and there’s a Christmas special. Both Smith and Gillan have signed up for a seventh series next year and there are big plans afoot for Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary in 2013.

In short, Smith is in no hurry to hang up his sonic screwdriver. “It’s a wild wave when you get to surf it,” he says. “You have to make the most of it while you can.”

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