Ncuti Gatwa to Racist ‘Doctor Who’ Fans: ‘Go Find a Hobby’

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | April 22, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | April 22, 2024 |

Doctor Who’s latest leading man, Ncuti Gatwa, recently sat down with Attitude magazine to talk Who, fame, racism, and self-acceptance. When asked if he kept up with the negative reactions to his casting as The Doctor, he was clear:

“No, no, no, no. I got a brief glimpse of it in initial casting, but it’s not something I’ll avidly keep up on.” Then he read the racist and homophobic haters for absolute filth, wondering:

“The hate? It is kind of fascinating to me because there’s so much energy they’re putting into it. You are so angry over something so inconsequential that you can’t be an interesting person. You can’t have much in your life. I don’t have time to do that. And so, I think they need to go find a hobby is one thing.”

But, he says, the people complaining are just afraid of change, and change is happening, if slowly.

“We do see a shift happening in casting, in positions of power and in the status quo. I mean, not a fast shift, things could tip over the other way a little bit quicker, but you see people kind of malfunctioning because things are changing.”

He reflected on his intersectional identities—Scottish, British, Black, immigrant, queer—sometimes colliding, and how he deals with it, saying, “I feel like I’ve kind of reached a place in my personal journey where I just am who I am, and that doesn’t have to change wherever I go. I just have to exist. And it’s a privilege to do so in my position because there’s many people that are in my intersections that don’t get a chance just to exist.”

“I think that’s the reason why I say that I struggle with hope sometimes,” he continued. “Because there’s a lot of things protecting me from the experiences that I could be having, should be having and have had. And I’m aware of that. I’m aware that my experience is not the typical Black queer experience…Just because I’ve now been cast as Doctor Who, all problems of inequality are now fixed? Things don’t work like that.”

But as of right now, he’s “learning not to care what other people think,” a hard thing to do when you’re experiencing as swift a rise to fame as he is. His breakout role as Eric in Sex Education, he says, was a “lifeline.”

“I needed a job. I had to pay my bills. It was literally, ‘I need a fucking job.’ And it happened to be a huge Netflix gig. My agent was like, ‘You’re definitely going to be able to afford an apartment.’”

But after spending more time with the character, he says Eric “ended up being that little surprise that teaches you more than you could ever teach him…He taught me to be braver.”