6) 12 White Male Actors In, It’s Time For A Change
Let’s get the obvious out the way: we’ve never had a female in the role before.
Let’s make it clear. The Doctor becoming a woman is nothing like James Bond or Batman being recast with a female in the part. While those characters have also been played by various actors, it’s part of Doctor Who‘s mythology that the Doctor can regenerate into someone of any gender or ethnic background. Regardless of the real-world side of things, it just doesn’t make much sense within the world of the show that this complete random process keeps ending up with him being a white man.
Over the past fifty two years, we’ve had fourteen Doctors (yes, we’re including John Hurt’s one-off War Doctor because he was awesome). All of them have been amazing and each has been their own unique individual, so we’re not suggesting they’ve all been the same. However, for the Doctor to keep being the same type of person for the rest of time would have been reductive in terms of casting the best actor and a betrayal of the core ethos of ‘change is good’ that has propelled the show forward for so long.
This time around, it either had to be a man of a different ethnic grouping or a woman. As it happened, they decided to go for the bigger change by casting the latter.
