GUARDIAN (UK): David Tennant: 'My bedpost really has very few notches' – interview
He's been Casanova, Romeo and the Doctor. Just don't call David Tennant a pin-up
by Simon Hattenstone
Friday 19 August 2011
There's a moment in the current production of Much Ado About Nothing that I particularly love. It's not when David Tennant's Benedick makes his entrance as a sun-bronzed prat in a golf buggy, nor his Cary Grant-style rat-a-tat-tat delivery of lines such as, "I would my horse had the speed of your tongue", not even when he finally gets to kiss Catherine Tate's Beatrice. It's the encore when Tennant skips across the stage, grinning from ear to ear, and you just know there's nothing on earth he'd rather be doing. I've never seen an actor so happy in his job.
Today, Tennant, 40, looks like a teenager posing as an adult. Here he is in his skinny jeans and Beatles T-shirt, bubbling with enthusiasm, and absurdly boyish. He's obsessed with hacking, can't stop reading about it. The police, the press, the politicians all in it together – perfect conspiracy. "Rupert's just said it's the most humbling day of his life. Too fucking right. Apparently he said it like a dead fish." Has he been hacked? Well, he has his suspicions, but the stories that surprised him weren't in News International tabloids, and he's more interested in the meta-drama than any tiny role he might have played. "There's something Greek about it, isn't there?"
Tennant is still best known as the Doctor. For many he is the Doctor – geeky, manic and a little bit gorgeous. He has also romped as Casanova, probed as DI Carlisle in the TV musical-drama Blackpool, theorised as cerebral scientist Arthur Eddington in Einstein And Eddington (stick a pair of specs on him and he's as dull as the next man), played Hamlet quite beautifully (awkward and paranoid, yet graceful) and appeared in a number of none-too-impressive movies. Perhaps that's the biggest surprise – that for all his popularity and talent, he isn't a huge film star. Maybe this will change with his first Hollywood movie. In Fright Night, a remake of the 1985 original, he plays veteran vampire hunter Peter Vincent like Russell Brand on speed. Sure, he's funny, but it's not the most challenging of roles...
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