Jodie Whittaker has a cosplay confession. “I wanted to go to Comic Con as Dustin from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Stranger Things,” she reveals, clearly unafraid to cross the streams of geek culture and potentially trigger the total collapse of🅠 reality. “I would have loved to have given myself a really tight curl and a baseball cap. But I couldn’t, because I was Jodie! I was my own person! I went as the Thirteenth Doctor instead...” 

As the latest incarnation of the Gallifreyan icon, Whittaker is on the brink of becoming a hero and an inspiration herself. So what better moment to sit down w♊ith her in a London hotel suite and discover the stuff that rocks her universe. She gives vibrant, heartfelt conversation, her brain pinballing between passions at authentic Time Lord speed: everything from Annihilation to Al Pacino to Arcade Fire (“‘Wake Up’ is the song I’d have played at my funeral!”) earn honorary mentions. She’s one of us. Someone who relishes the opportunity to geek out. 

, “and even now I can be knocked sideways by something, and be so excited.” Hello, Stranger Things. “That kind of adventure is absolutely what made me fall in love with cinema, and also why I wanted to be an actor in the first place. I didn’t study film. I wanted to slide down the waterfall. Essentially I wanted to be Indiana Jones. I didn’t want to be tied up going, ‘Indy!’” 

Martha Plimpton

“My first female hero was probably Martha Plimpton in The Gooni෴es, because in that crowd that’s who I could see myself as. Really I wanted to be Mikey, or Chunk, because he gets to swing on a rope, but I looked at her and she had that awkward look and the short hair... I had short hair. And Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth, because she had flaws and I loved seeing that as a young girl, seeing her trying to right her mistakes, through this extraordinary and absolutely terrifying adventure.

“My role models were very often played by boys or men. In E.T. I wanted to be Elliott. Maybe it was just down to being brought up in a house where we didn’t have this gender-specific upbringing but I never thought I wouldn’t be able to do it because I was a girl. I was used to watching Atreyu in The Neverending Story and wanting to be that part. I didn’t want to be the princess while everything collapses around you! Now I’m about to be embraced as a female version of Doctor Who. I love the fact I can look up to anyone and they don’t have to look like me, which is hopefully what will happen with this, like the young boys won’t suddenly go, “I d🧸on’t want to look up to a girl!” 

Peter O’Toole

“All my scenes in Venus were with him. It wasn’t about hitting marks, it wasn’t about anything except exploring a scene and the characters and to do that with one of the greatest actors of our time..♛. It came at a perfect time because I was so young and so naïve. If it was now I’d be not intimidated but much more nervous of the moment. I was just a bit of a stroppy teenager. I was like, 'Hiya, you alright?'

"I asked him loads of questions and he always gave me wonderful answers. I also had a hundred Peter O’Toole stories that people would tell me. I’d say, 'Is this true, because my mum’s friend said that you did this back in whenever...' And he’d be like, 'Oh, I don’t remember...' He was incredibly generous with me, because I was just this little kid who was nattering away. What impressed me about him was that he’d done loads of work. I thought oh, surely you get to that age and you don’t need to do yo🧸ur homewor✱k, because you know what you’re doing, but his script was covered in notes. I felt really inspired by the fact that no matter how long you do this job, you can always be learning, because then it’s never boring. And you’re not boring.”