When Karen Gillan was growing up in Inverness, she spent five years on a waiting list to join a drama club. So instead, the girl who has perked up our screens as the Doctor's latest assistant retreated into her own imagination. Her one obsession – apart from the Spice Girls, surely mandatory for any schoolgirl in the mid-Nineties – was Alice in Wonderland. "It did make me dance around the room," she says, her Scottish accent undimmed by six years in London. Referring to the Disney cartoon version of Lewis Carroll's classic, she even had the tie-in book, which she used to act out for her father – "who was probably really bored" – in what she estimates was her first attempt at acting.
If it's an obsession that has spilt over into adulthood – "I'm going to call my daughter 'Alice', if I ever have one," she states – it's more than just a childish hangover. The red-haired Gillan, who at 5ft 10in is far taller than she appears on screen, admits she thought of Alice when she was working on her Doctor Who character, Amy Pond.
"I remember thinking: 'What's her favourite film?' And I thought it could be Alice in Wonderland."
It seems an apt choice, given Amy – dragged from her mundane existence to travel time and space with Matt Smith's new Doctor – gets to "explore" her very own Wonderland.
The same could be said for Gillan, who has gone from bit-part actress and part-time model to landing one of the most coveted roles on television. Her arrival on the show couldn't have been more arresting, with Amy, a kiss-o-gram by trade, spending the first episode dressed in a policewoman's uniform. The tabloids had a field day, renaming the show 'Doctor Phew'.
Even Smith weighed in, claiming Gillan was "categorically the sexiest companion ever", knocking such recent co-stars as Catherine Tate and Billie Piper for six. But Gillan seems rather nonplussed by the instant sex symbol status. "It doesn't feel like a massive achievement," she says.
That first episode broke the record for the biggest audience ever on BBC America when it aired in the States.
"We did this one screening in New York where people camped out overnight to get a seat," she recalls, breathlessly. She can even ponder the fact that she's now on Steven Spielberg's radar. A long-term fan of the show, the director has just worked with Doctor Who's new series producer Steven Moffat, who has co-written Spielberg's forthcoming Tintin film, The Secret of the Unicorn. "It's mad to think that he's a fan of it," she says. "Spielberg apparently said to Steven: 'The world is a better place with Doctor Who in it.'"
Gillan seems almost embarrassed when I point out that being in Spielberg's mind is no bad thing. After all, her film experience so far has consisted of playing Young Girl in Bus Station in Richard Jobson's frenetic 2008 thriller New Town Killers.
Next week sees a bigger appearance in first-time director Colm McCarthy's Outcast, a British horror film co-starring James Nesbitt and Red Road's Kate Dickie, that sets out to blend the monster movie genre with Polanski-style terror. "It's like a dark, scary fairy-tale," she explains. "It's all about Celtic mythology."
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