The joke across the United Kingdom is that their entertainment industry has a grand total of twelve actors, six sets, and one tie. One need only look at the overlapping area on the Venn Diagram of actors who have appeared on both Doctor Who and in the Harry Potter film series to see it. One such actor is David Tennant, who appeared in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as Bartemius Crouch Jr. in 2005 before going on to play one of the most beloved incarnations of the Doctor from Christmas Day of that year until the end of time, which, for him, aired in two parts on Christmas Day of 2009 and New Years Day of 2010.
Tennant’s son, the eldest child of his wife Georgia Moffett, has also caught the acting bug, and the 17-year-old has already put some thought into his potential Doctoral future. Asked in an interview with The Sunday Post if he’d be interested in following in his adopted father’s size 12 Converse sneakers, Ty Tennant, born Ty Peter Moffett-Martin, admitted: “I don’t think I would ever decline the offer. Doctor Who is such a massive thing to take on. Whoever is truly right for it will get the role. If I am granted that, I will certainly do my best.”
The young actor’s best would surely be brilliant given his Gallifreyan pedigree. Not only is he the adopted son of the Tenth Doctor, but his mother is the daughter of Peter Davison (the stagename of Peter Moffett), who played the vegetable-adorned fifth incarnation of the Doctor from 1982 to 1984, and who appeared alongside his eventual son-in-law in the 2007 multi-Doctor mini-episode “Time Crash.” Moreover, David and Georgia met on the set of the 2008 episode “The Doctor’s Daughter,” in which Georgia played Jenny, a genetic anomaly cloned from the Tenth Doctor.
Ty would hardly be the first descendant of a Doctor to play a literary character, though he’d certainly be the first to take over the TARDIS himself. Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films, and Alfred Enoch, who played Dean Thomas in that same franchise, are the grandson of the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and the son of First Doctor companion Ian Chesterton, William Russell, respectively, and Sean Pertwee, who recently played the butler Alfred Pennyworth over five seasons of Gotham, is the son of the Third Doctor, John Pertwee.
Whether he’ll ever get the chance to pilot the TARDIS on Doctor Who remains to be seen, of course, but in the meantime, you can catch Ty Tennant as Tom Gresham in the eight-episode miniseries adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds on ePix.
