When guests visit the “Doctor Who” set, there’s one thing star Jodie Whittaker always gets asked about.
“Whenever we’ve had guest actors on, they always want to see” her sonic screwdriver, Whittaker told TheWrap in a recent interview. She added that guests usually gasp and ask, “please, can I hold the sonic?”
Whittaker added that while her sonic screwdriver might look very different from iterations in the past, it “still has all the powers and wonderful traits of the sonic. It hasn’t changed its function.”
For those less versed in the “Who”-verse, the sonic screwdriver is a versatile piece of advanced Gallifreyan technology possessed by each iteration of the Doctor. And each Doctor has their own unique sonic screwdriver, meaning that the reveal of what the new tool will look like can be almost as exciting for fans as who the new Doctor might be.
Here’s a closer look at Whittaker’s sonic screwdriver, which was revealed in July:
New Doctor, New Sonic Screwdriver. #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/ThXlmJLKer
— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) July 19, 2018
Whittaker also told TheWrap about what it’s like to be the first female Doctor on the longstanding series.
“Essentially, it’s not a gender — the Doctor is a Time Lord, an alien with two hearts,” Whittaker said. “Those things don’t change. The body changes, and the body change between [Christopher Eccleston], David [Tennant] and Matt [Smith] and Peter [Davison] — obviously it’s the [same] gender but it’s a very different form that the Doctor’s regenerated into, and I am an extension of that change. But not a diversion from it.”
Whittaker said she’s excited to give the Doctor a new point of view and a new body.
“For me, to play this role like somebody else has played it would defeat the object of being cast,” she said. “It didn’t require me to physically take on someone else’s performance because the traits of the Doctor that carry the Doctor throughout the 55 year history of the show are in the writing, and as long as I was being truthful to the writing, then I was honoring those traits.”
“Doctor Who” Season 11 premieres on BBC America on Oct. 7.