Doctor Who icon Jodie Whittaker discusses exciting new role: "Suranne Jones is a swan and I’m a feral chicken"

That’s one way of describing two of Britain’s best actors, an award-winning duo yoked together as the odd couple in ITV’s current drama Frauds about a pair of hucksters on their last heist. Whittaker’s Sam is the calm and Jones’s Bert is the chaos, but in real life, says Whittaker, it’s the other way round.

“Suranne is a swan because although there might be little legs pedalling underneath, she is gliding along on top. Then there’s me saying, ‘Argh, I’ve lost my scripts. I think I’ve left part of my costume in my trailer.’ I’m like the 14-year-old boy who forgot their backpack and gets sent home from school. I’m loud, noisy and unfocused whereas Suranne is just such an amazing person to be around because it feels like she’s got her s**t together.”

Yet, with all due respect to feral chickens, Jodie Whittaker has very much got her s**t together. If every modern actor craves variety, meaty scripts, a dab of acclaim and a modicum of fame, then Whittaker is currently in pole position. She was and remains, of course, the first female Doctor in Doctor Who.

But since then, she’s zigged and zagged from hard-edged dramas like Jack Thorne’s Toxic Town and the second series of Jimmy McGovern’s Time, to roles doing cartoon voiceovers, the new job in Frauds – funny, smart, action-packed — and after this a starring role in the much-anticipated TV adaptation of James Graham’s hit play Dear England. Along the way there’s always the Tardis to fall back on, as she did in her surprise cameo earlier this year.

“I’m really lucky – I get to work in some very intense, emotional dramas and I will always want to be a part of that. But there is something very refreshing about getting to the end of the script of episode one of something like Frauds and going, ‘Oh, I haven’t cried.’”

Putting on Sam’s shoes also gave Whittaker license to be a bit naughty. With literal partner-in-crime Bert, Sam picks pockets, slips watches and attempts to steal famous paintings from Spain’s finest galleries. In real life, Whittaker would like to stress, she does none of the above.

“Absolutely not. I’m the most honest person in the world. I don’t like breaking rules. To the point where I’ve done that thing of getting a takeaway coffee and then deciding I’m going to sit at a table outside, so I’ve gone back in and said, ‘Do I need to pay more to sit at the table?’ If it says don’t do it, I don’t do it.”

In Frauds, part of what draws Sam back to law-breaking is that she and Bert are/were highly proficient fraudsters. Flashbacks show them at work back in the day, duping marks, working scams, Robin Hooding lizard-like ex-pats and generally having a right old laugh.

“They’re actually good at something,” says Whittaker. “And I understand that. I’m not one of those people that are multi-skilled – there are a lot of actors who speak seven languages and trained to be a doctor or whatever. That is not the path I was on. I literally barely speak English and I’ve lost all ability to write now because I send everything abbreviated with two thumbs. So Sam and I share that thing – without this one avenue, especially at 43, I find myself thinking, ‘What would I do outside of this?’”

She also, as a married mum of two, appreciates the lure of some mid-life thrills that Sam can’t resist. “There’s an adrenaline attached to what she does and I understand from an acting point of view what it feels like to have adrenaline attached to your job.”

Being an actor, Whittaker concedes, contains an element of fraudulence every time you go on stage. “The thing that I can totally associate with is the masks. You’ve got many masks, many versions of yourself as an actor. But then that’s the same with anyone – you wouldn’t get someone in a restaurant shouting, ‘Shut up, eat your dinner!’ like you do at home. We all have a million masks.”

One of the things that Sam keeps telling Bert is she needs to grow up. Whittaker, born and raised in West Yorkshire, was cast as the lead in a major film, Venus, the year after she left drama school in 2005. “Growing up? What does that even mean? Because what’s so wonderful for me is that the thing I loved the most as a kid was playing pretend. And I’m still doing it.”

But the playing field has changed. Back then there was no way that an actor like Suranne Jones, who came up through soap, could be calling the shots in TV production and creating female-led dramas like Frauds or her recent Netflix show Hostage.

“One of the great things if you’re in a position like Suranne where you’re creating your own work, is you don’t just create one female character. She and Anne-Marie [O’Connor, co-creator] have written a world of amazing female roles of all ages in this.”

The funny thing amid all this mutual admiration is that she and Jones have never worked together before. They don’t live far apart from one another in London and have frequented the same coffee shops – where Whittaker keeps trying to pay extra for a table.

So why couldn’t she do a Suranne Jones herself, take up the baton, create some Whittaker originals? “I’m not a writer, don’t want to write and I never will. I am in pre-production on quite a few projects and there are lots of development opportunities that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of. But what you realise is that things move a bit slower than you thought. Sometimes, a project that I would audition for six weeks before it starts, can be six years in development.”

Part of the story in Frauds is about leaving your past behind, or trying to. Does she think people can change or are their feet cemented in their own history? “Everybody changes – love, life, loss, all of those things shape you as humans the older you get. But my best mates from growing up are still my best mates. They are literally arriving in Kings Cross in two hours’ time and we’re going to see Coldplay tomorrow night. I think if I’d reinvented myself too much I’d have lost too many core things.”

There’s now another constant in her life. One job that keeps coming back round again. Right in the middle of filming Frauds in Tenerife, Whittaker had to sneak back to Cardiff to film a cameo as the Thirteenth Doctor for Ncuti Gatwa’s farewell in The Reality War.

“It was a right ball-ache, because no one on Frauds knew, so we had to sell it to them as some sort of pick-up job I had to do back in the UK. I flew into Gatwick at midnight and got picked up and taken to Cardiff at like half three, four o’clock, got picked up at six and taken straight to work. And then I remembered that sci-fi dialogue is actually quite hard to learn.”

Still the job, she says, was pure heaven. “I’ve never loved a job more than I did Doctor Who. It was a joy. We were a massive family, working with Mandip, Brad, Tosin, all my companion team and every actor that came in. Living in Wales, I loved it. I’d never worked with Russell T Davies, even though we’ve talked so much [Chris Chibnall was showrunner during Whittaker’s tenure]. So, for him to call me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this scene.’ I was like, ‘Yep. I don’t need to read it, I’ll be there.’”

Which means the next question hardly needs asking. “Would I go back again? Absolutely 100 per cent. It might be 15, 20, 30 years later but the joy of being the Doctor is you never know when you’ll be called on.”

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Frauds is streaming now on ITVX and continues at 9pm on Sunday 12th October on ITV1.

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