Profile: Karen Gillan

The young actress rocketed to fame as Amy Pond, Doctor Who’s glamorous assistant. Now Hollywood beckons

Abraham Lincoln, America’s tallest  president, was once impertinently asked how long a man’s legs should be. Lincoln scarcely paused: “Just long enough to reach the ground.”

Karen Gillan couldn’t say the same. The girl from Inverness may have long legs too, but for the past two years her feet haven’t touched the floor. When Gillan strode into Doctor Who in a police uniform and shook out her auburn curls, it was clear the small screen would not contain her for long. She’s about to play 1960s supermodel Jean Shrimpton (during her affair with photographer David Bailey) in a BBC4 biopic, after which she will take the lead in Romeo and Brittney, David Baddiel’s directorial debut, as a New Jersey high-school girl who travels back in time to 13th-century Verona. She is also down to play an author who can’t write when she’s happy in the romantic comedy Not Another Happy Ending, and in October she’ll somehow find the time to fulfil a long-cherished dream of appearing on stage, in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence at London’s Donmar Warehouse.

It was in May 2009 that Gillan was plucked, as she cheerfully admits, “from obscurity”. Having left the Highland capital for the prestigious Italia Conti stage school in London at 17, she had impulsively quit when offered an episode of Rebus, but the acting career then fizzled out. She became a barmaid, learning to shamrock a pint of Guinness. She was spotted as a model, which paid the bills for a couple of years, and won some bit parts on The Kevin Bishop Show, in which she demonstrated a talent for comedy voices and wearing skimpy underwear.

But Doctor Who changed everything. Her first clue that life would never be the same was the secrecy surrounding her callback. “I couldn’t even tell BBC reception where I was going,” she told The Guardian last year. “I had to pretend it was for something called Panic Moon, which is an anagram of companion.”

The MI6 schtick continued with a grilling from BBC executives: had she any skeletons in her closet that might compromise their flagship family drama? Apart from the facts that her mother was a long-term Doctor Who fan with a Dalek bubble-bath to prove it, and that Gillan had a passion for murdering Elvis’s ‘Always on My Mind’ thanks to a father who sang at open-mike nights, they drew a blank. Journalists have, too. As one interviewer put it, “Karen is, truly and annoyingly, a lucky, pretty, talented, happy, smart, leggy, ordinary, honest, laughing girl, from a very loving family.”

An only child, Gillan grew up painfully shy. “I was one of those weird children that just couldn’t talk to people,” she confessed to The Daily Telegraph. “I was going on stage trying to sing but I couldn’t get anything out.” As a “weird, long, ginger girl” she was teased by other teenagers for having red hair. “I don’t know why, though,” she says. “There are loads of us in Scotland!”

Though she may be playing Doctor Who’s feistiest assistant yet – one who’s never content just to accept that “the Doctor knows best” – the shy girl inside is never far away. She fidgets like crazy in interviews, fingers fluttering, legs crossing and uncrossing. Often she doesn’t quite know the right thing to say, but opens her mouth and gamely allows the words to fall out regardless. With those Bambi legs and big cartoonish eyes, she really can seem like a deer caught in the headlights of the media glare.

Fame can go to some people’s head: interviewers hanging on your every word, queues of American fans stretching round the block dressed as you, sharing the stage of the Royal Albert Hall with Daleks for a Doctor Who Prom. But 23-year-old Gillan remains refreshingly unaffected.

She unwinds in what little spare time she has during filming Doctor Who by eating Nairn’s oatcakes and hummus with co-star Matt Smith. She owns just one posh handbag (Chanel, if you’re asking), so special to her that she calls it ‘she’ – as in “She doesn’t come out much.” Her most recent paparazzi incident came when she was snapped doing nothing more exciting than buying a bonsai tree in a garden centre with her long-term boyfriend, the photographer Patrick Green. And she has a nickname for the bonsai too: Albert, after its Latin name Alberta graptoveria. 

Until recently, her greatest indiscretion was allowing her mobile phone to go off while being interviewed on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Twice. But then, this summer, came Towelgate.

Gillan made gossip columns around the world when, allegedly, she became ‘tired and emotional’ after a long night’s partying in a New York hotel during a promotional trip for Doctor Who. “Scottish lass enjoys one too many” may not sound the stuff of shock-horror headlines, but there was more.

According to the Daily Mail, Gillan shut herself out of her hotel room – stark naked. Disorientated, she scratched at the door of one long-term resident. The man, evidently suspicious, just peered at the distressed starlet through the peephole. “I saw a woman giving this person two towels before getting in the lift and leaving,” he told the paper. “Then I saw this young woman, completely naked, trying to wrap these two towels round her and not having much luck.” In the end hotel security took her back to her room.

If the story is true, it might give those BBC execs some palpitations, but it certainly hasn’t done her burgeoning career any harm. A few weeks later, she appeared on the US TV chat show The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson in Los Angeles. The enthusiastic Gillan leaned and swayed about so much in her big armchair that the host, a fellow Scot, joked that a storm was blowing up in the studio. But with her naive innocence, she effortlessly won over the US audience.

During the Ferguson interview, Gillan dropped a possible hint about her future, when she said she’d decided to stay in LA for a little while. Steven Spielberg, no less, is a die-hard Doctor Who fan, and Gillan has said she would love to work with the Coen Brothers.

Just as her alter-ego, Amy Pond, thought nothing of blasting off into time and space with the Doctor, so Gillan is leaving Inverness increasingly far behind. Scotland will be the poorer. But we’re sure she’ll still be getting the Nairn’s oatcakes shipped in.

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