How Karen Gillan went from sexy sidekick to super siren

Karen Gillan's powers extend beyond being able to thwart aliens and grapple with the theories of time travel. She is an idol to teenage girls, an object of desire to male Whovians and an exemplary fashion muse, courted by designers and the makers of luxury handbags, and con-sidered only marginally less influential than fellow celebrity clotheshorses Alexa Chung and the Duchess of Cambridge.

That Karen has entered the national consciousness so completely seems astonishing when you consider that only two years ago she was an unknown actress from Inverness, working in a South London pub and doing a spot of modelling to subsidise her career. But then Steven Moffat came knocking and selected her to be Matt Smith's companion, Amy Pond, in his rebootedDoctor Who. Her first appearance, as a police officer kissogram dressed in the shortest skirt the Tardis has ever witnessed, ensured her life would never be the same again.

Karen, who at 23 is the same age as her on-screen alter ego, happily takes full responsibility for the skirt that sent so many sci-fi fans into an interdimensional spin. 'They kept trying to put me in various denim ensembles. And I was like, "No, no, no. It has to be a short skirt, because that is what girls my age wear." And when I wore that skirt, I felt like Amy.' As if to prove a point, today she is wearing an equally short black Lycra mini and a pink woollen jumper sewn with tiny pearls, booty from one of her many trips to the vintage clothing emporia of Brick Lane. 'Amy is basically the person I want to be,' she explains. 'I just don't have her sassy attitude. But I like that about her, and I like that about other people. I am attracted to people who are mouthy and brave and adventurous.'

She may not be brave and adventurous, squealing and running away when a wasp hovers over her Caesar salad, but Karen is wildly beautiful, with wide, surprised eyes, a heart-shaped face, acres of auburn hair and milky pale skin. As such she seems a clever choice to play the queen of gamine beauties, the model Jean Shrimpton, in the forthcoming BBC drama We'll Take Manhattan, about Shrimpton's 1960s ascendancy and her relationship with the cocky Cockney photographer David Bailey. For Karen, it was a dream role. 'If I could go back to any period in history it would be the Sixties. Young people were so powerful.' She is also about to tackle her first theatre role, in John Osborne's 1960s play Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar Warehouse, playing a put-upon secretary to Douglas Hodge's disaffected divorce lawyer: 'Forty per cent of me is terrified, the other 60 per cent is really looking forward to it.'

Karen has always been nerve-racked by the prospect of performance. An only child, she was raised by her mother Marie, a science-fiction fan, and her father John, a care-home manager, who taught his daughter chess and took her to charity shops every weekend hunting for classic vinyl, instiling in her a passion for Elvis Presley and Nina Simone. John is a seasoned pub open-mic performer ('like karaoke, but a bit more serious') and Karen, who was not academic, initially considered a career as a musician. 'I played the piano from a really young age and I was thinking about doing something with performance and music, and that introduced me to acting. I had always struggled with nerves so it was quite difficult for me.' She left home at 16 to go to drama school in Edinburgh, and came to London aged 17, living on the Old Kent Road with a group of fellow drama students and studying at the Italia Conti school until she dropped out for a role in an episode of ITV's Scottish detective series Rebus. A couple of fallow years followed and then came Doctor Who and the universal adulation, the intensive filming schedules in Cardiff and the merchandise - Karen's new flat in Kennington is filled with Amy Pond dolls, still in their original packaging.

The second half of the latest series of Doctor Who has just started and sees Amy coming to terms with the revelation that River Song, played with sexy relish by Alex Kingston, is actually her daughter, something Karen was understandably 'shell-shocked' to discover. She is signed up for another series after this one, which will please the serious fans, who have generally been reduced to a state of abject adoration by Karen's performance, although there was some dismay at the hint of romantic attraction between the Doctor and his companion (Whovians just cannot conceive of a Doctor with those sort of urges).

As in the show, in real life Karen and Matt Smith are great friends, going to gigs together in Camden and hanging out in each other's Cardiff hotel rooms in the evenings, eating hummus and oat cakes, watching YouTube and getting up to mischief, even though both have partners - Matt is going out with the model Daisy Lowe and Karen has been with the photographer Patrick Green and his tortoise Brian for over five years. 'Matt and I do stay in character a lot when we're filming, without even realising it. The lines blur; the way we interact in real life is sometimes a lot like the way we interact in the show. To be honest, a lot of the time we act like lunatics, dancing, keeping the energy up. The show is high-octane, and I am quite hyper anyway.' As with all intense collaborative efforts, it sounds like the Doctor Who team play as hard as they work (the schedule is 11 days' filming out of every 14) and stories of high jinks have leaked out, such as the night when Karen was discovered drunk and naked in the hallway of a New York hotel. She giggles when asked about this, but will not elaborate.
Back home in London, she likes to spend her weekends shopping for vintage clothes. 'It's one of my favourite hobbies. I start at the top of Brick Lane and work my way down and I always have an outfit by the time I get to the bottom.' On Saturday evenings she goes to gigs and 'talks to randoms'. Her favourite new bands are Mother Mother and Everything Everything. She loves antiques, esoterica and the gothic. Her favourite film isWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and she would like to play Lady Macbeth, 'also from Inverness', and Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess: 'She was like a vampire, she killed people.'

Despite Karen's almost childish charm - during the ES shoot she skips and whoops for no apparent reason andughs girlishly when asked a question she doesn't want to answer - she possesses a dark, Miss Havisham sensibility. Her favourite episode from last season's Doctor Who was the one written by the novelist Neil Gaiman, in which the team visit a shadowy, liminal planet whose inhabitants subsist on second-hand possessions and body parts. She loves anything old, hates anything new and wears a cross handed down by her paternal grandmother, a singer who never pursued her passion professionally and was a great inspiration to her granddaughter. She died long before Karen became Amy Pond. 'She was the one who gave me the determination to do all this; in a weird way I am living out her dreams.' ES

The Girl Who Waited Review

Identity has been a major theme of the sixth season of Doctor Who. From the TARDIS taking the form of a beautiful yet quirky young woman to The Ganger Doctor to the major revelation that River Song is Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory’s (Arthur Darvill) part-Time Lord daughter, every character on the series has somehow navigated through the difficult reality of who they really are and of who they are destined to be. That navigation is what pretty much fuels the fantastic and emotional “The Girl Who Waited”.

Obviously, the “Girl” in the title of the episode is Amy Pond herself. She, Rory and The Doctor (Matt Smith) end up on a planet called Apalapucia –- thanks to the whims of the Time Lord –- which seemingly consists of white rooms that resemble the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Amy is immediately separated from her boys, with her staying in what we can consider present-day while the men end up 36 years into the future. They don’t realize their time jump until Rory meets up with an older version of Amy (or “Old Amy” as we’ll refer to her), who is battle-weary after having to fend off “helpful” robots who want to stick needles full of “medicine” in her (which is poisonous to humans), and extremely and insanely bitter at having been abandoned by the men and living alone for all that time.

Abandonment is also another major theme in the Steven Moffat-helmed era of Doctor Who, of course. We know this isn’t the first time Amelia Pond has had to wait a very long time for The Doctor. She’s spent most of her childhood and teen years waiting for him to return; to help her reveal to her family and friends that she wasn’t crazy-obsessed with an imaginary alien friend. The second time around, though, she’s downright pissed off at him, dismissing him alarmingly as a “blue box man”. But she’s most especially angry at him for separating her from her Rory. In the time since being abandoned on Apalapucia, she’s disarmed one of those “helpful” robots, drew hair and a face on its head, and started calling it by her husband’s name. (It is actually creepier than Wilson the Volleyball in that it looks like a messed up Mii-version of our Rory.)

Old Amy is also pissed off at Rory, the same man who waited for her for 2,000 years -– as a centurion made of plastic, nonetheless. He had promised to always have her back but he was nowhere to be found for 36 years. Even though her anger towards Rory isn’t as great (or at least more abstract) than the anger she has towards The Doctor, she outright refuses to help him rescue Young Amy (once The Doctor discovers their time jump). Why should Young Amy experience the joy of living a full life with the man she loves when Old Amy couldn’t do that? Why should she NOT experience the bitterness that has made Old Amy who she is?

But who is Old Amy, really? We’re all defined by the people who we surround ourselves with. If you surround yourself with charitable people, then you’ll be a charitable person as well. If you surround yourself with thieves, you’ll eventually become a thief yourself. Old Amy has had no contact with a sentient being for 36 years. She’s foaming-at-the-mouth angry, like a rabid animal. She might as well have been living in a cabin in the woods, Unabomber-style, sending packages off to unsuspecting victims. Is this the Amy The Doctor and Rory should be saving?

It is a hard choice but it is one that Rory doesn’t want to make. Instead, he tries to convince The Doctor to save BOTH Amys since Old Amy won’t budge unless she’s tags along as well. The Doctor knows that having two Amys from different timelines would create a major paradox (he is the Time Lord, after all) but goes along with the plan until he and Rory are able to rescue Young Amy, bring her into the TARDIS and locks Old Amy out. It is vicious double cross but a necessary one even though it has him and Rory abandoning Old Amy again — in a heartbreaker of a scene which, for my money, is the best of the season so far.

But is it truly abandonment if that particular experience never really happened? Young Amy is safe in the blue box. She’ll never have to go through 36 lonely years on a freaky white planet. She’ll never turn into the Old Amy we saw in “The Girl Who Waited”. Or maybe she will turn into that Old Amy but in a slightly modified version. Maybe, in the not-so-near future, Rory passes away (again!), leaving her to grow into a bitter old woman alone. Or their marriage doesn’t work out and they’ll go through a horrible and prolonged divorce process and she then will shun out the world. Who knows? That timeline hasn’t been established yet since it has yet to be written.

These fundamental questions and the emotions that come with them are played wonderfully by Darvill (who, as always, is at top of his game) and Gillan, who has never been better than she is in this episode. (Smith, smartly enough, takes a backseat to his two companions.) Her work in this episode is worthy of massive praise, and dare I say it, an Emmy nomination. (Sci-Fi rarely gets love from award shows.) Old Amy is a complex character, layered upon what she already does as Young Amy, with an extra dash of thick Scottish accent. The way she stands, hunched over in armor and with a sword in hand like an angry member of the House of Stark (Game of Thrones reference, nerds!), is all we need to know about her journey. Her sad and lonely journey which no longer exists.

Anyway, we’re two episodes away from the season finale. Have any theories as to what is going to happen next? Will Rory and Amy finally give up being The Doctor’s traveling companions? How will River pop back into the action? And how will The Doctor finally deal with the knowledge of his death? Please share your comments down below.

Day of The Daleks (DVD)

By Louis Marks. The Third Doctor's first battle with the Daleks.


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