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INTERVIEW

Jemma Redgrave: ‘Doctor Who will keep me young’

The actress would be happy to be remembered for the sci-fi series, she tells Dominic Maxwell

Jemma Redgrave: “My character wanted to make her way on merit. That wasn’t difficult to play”

Dominic Maxwell

Saturday November 25 2023, 12.01am, The Times

Jemma Redgrave has a problem. “Every time I get a new office,” she says, “it blows up.” Granted, she admits, the first time we saw her office — in the 50th anniversary Doctor Who special of 2013 that featured Matt Smith and David Tennant — it was in the Tower of London, and that one has stayed standing. Otherwise, though, in her role as Kate Stewart, the head of the Doctor’s paramilitary allies UNIT, her workplaces seem to routinely explode. That they seem to get swankier and swankier each time only seems to make them more vulnerable to the zap gun.

She won’t give anything away, and the BBC is keeping under wraps each of the three 60th anniversary specials, which start tonight. Yet you have to fear for the giant floating Marvel-style Unit HQ that features in the trailer. Redgrave doesn’t appear until the final part, which pits David Tennant’s returning Doctor against Neil Patrick Harris’s Toymaker, a villain not seen since 1966. She will, however, be the one other holdover from the 50th anniversary specials. “Yes,” she says with a disbelieving smile over morning coffee in a north London café, “I think it’s just me and David.”

She and her sons, now aged 29 and 23, had watched the series ever since it returned, after 16 years off our screens (a one-off comeback starring Paul McGann aside), in 2005. She wondered for a while why seemingly every other actor she knew got a role in it. Hers, though, has proved to be the longest-running.

She first played Kate Stewart opposite Smith in an episode in 2012. She didn’t realise the significance of the surname at the time: Stewart is the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the head of Unit from 1968 to 1975, during the eras of Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. All of which is catnip to the fans, some of whom, as emissaries from Doctor Who magazine, were on set doing a story on her first day. They helped her to join the dots.

As Kate Stewart in the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials (BBC)

Stewart, after all, didn’t use her full name. “She didn’t want to take advantage of her connections and wanted to make her way on merit,” Redgrave says. As the daughter of an actor (Corin Redgrave), the niece of two actresses (Vanessa Redgrave and Lynn Redgrave), the granddaughter of actors (Michael Redgrave, Rachel Kempson) and the cousin of actresses (Joely Richardson and Natasha Richardson), she knew where Stewart was coming from. It can be tedious spending your time fending questions about how you’ve got where you are today, after all.

“That you’re some sort of nepo baby? It can be, can’t it? Sometimes those questions go on and on and on, many, many, many, many years down the line.” Redgrave, a gifted under-player of a scene, gives a surprisingly full-hearted chuckle. “So that wasn’t a difficult scene to play.”

Redgrave appears only sporadically, but has rubbed shoulders with six doctors: Smith, Tennant, Peter Capaldi, John Hurt (in the 50th special), Jodie Whittaker and, coming soon, Ncuti Gatwa, who will take the lead once Tennant’s celebratory trilogy is done.

There have been rumours that Stewart and UNIT are getting their own show, but Redgrave insists that this is news to her. Then again, it’s rare for her to be permitted to admit even that she is in the first Gatwa series. She has to sign an NDA each time she shoots the show so that nobody, with the exception of her partner, who may be staying with her in Wales during shooting anyway, knows what she is working on.

She understands the rationale for this, although it can become absurd. During lockdown, because travel was restricted, the BBC sent a car to her north London home to pick her up for filming. On the way to the car she bumped into Smith, who lives in the area, walking his dog. He asked where she was heading. Cardiff, she told him. He asked what she was working on. “I said, ‘I can’t possibly tell you. I’ve signed an NDA.’ And he said, ‘Oh well, send them all my love.’”

Redgrave is a young-looking 58. Her extensive stage work includes appearing in a London production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters with her aunts. Her TV work includes starring in the series Bramwell as well as recurring roles in Holby City, Grantchester, Silent Witness and Cold Blood. How would she feel if the world remembered her most for her sporadic role as the head of UNIT?

“I think that’s OK,” she says. “I grew up watching Jon Pertwee. And Jon Pertwee doesn’t change in my imagination. The people I grew up watching don’t get older in my imagination and I will remain in the imagination of the children who watch this 60th-year episode. And that is a kind of lovely thing. So I’m very happy to be remembered as Kate Stewart. Also, she’s a formidable woman. She has humour and heart and courage. And she’s vulnerable and aware of her limitations. So she’s kind of human in every possible way, even though she exists in a world of aliens and tech.”

On the subject of “the sci-fi stuff”, she admits that jargon and technobabble can be hard to play: the plot may need it, but it’s hard to bring much of yourself to. So she tries to find some emotional resonance of her own. “Either that or you just play it fast. It’s one or the other.”

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She has found, too, that the fans will support her in other roles. Recently she appeared in a play, Octopolis, at the Hampstead Theatre in London. “And a lot of Who fans came to see that, which is a lovely thing. She’s a great character, but partly the reason that UNIT has continued through this series is because fans have been very vocal in their love of those storylines.”

When she was growing up, it took her a while to admit that she wanted to be an actress. “My parents split when I was young. My mum [Deirdre Hamilton-Hill] supported me and my brother. There wasn’t a lot of money around, but we did get taken to the theatre. And I think growing up in the theatre, and particularly not having a fear of Shakespeare because I encountered him on the stage and not in the classroom for the first time, was a great privilege.”

It was a trip to see the Wars of the Roses Shakespeare history plays at the RSC in Stratford when she was 13 that convinced her she wanted to act. “Before that I’d played my cards close to my chest. I didn’t have much confidence. I was quiet about it because there were a lot of people in my family who acted.” When she told her father, he gave her a complete Arden set of Shakespeare plays, and wrote “to commemorate your decision to become an actress” on the front page.

She went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, after which she began to work regularly. She appeared in a TV film, The Relief of Belsen, with her father, and in Howards End with Vanessa, but beyond that has ploughed her own furrow. So is the family connection one she can celebrate at this point?

What’s lovely, she says, is going to a set and having crew members come up to her and tell her they worked with her father, or her aunt, or her cousin or her brother Luke, a successful cameraman. “And usually anybody who says ‘I’ve worked with somebody in your family’ says it because they loved working with them. So it’s suddenly not quite such an intimidating environment.”

Family fame is dwarfed by sci-fi fame anyway. “I’m ‘her from Doctor Who’. And if you’ve got a body of work behind you, people don’t talk about the name. I just feel lucky that I come from the family that I come from because I grew up with books and theatre, which is a proper privilege. There wasn’t a lot of money, but there was that, and that’s worth everything.”

Doctor Who is on BBC1 and iPlayer from November 25. Jemma Redgrave’s episode is on December 9

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#Jemma Redgrave #Kate Stewart #Doctor Who #60th Anniversary Specials #Interview

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