Doctor Who Showrunner Opens Up About Making Richard E. Grant’s Doctor Canon

There were tons of elements to unpack in Doctor Who‘s newest season, from long-running mysteries to surprising revelations regarding the franchise’s canon. One of the most shocking instances of the latter occurred in the episode “Rogue”, in which The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) proved his identity as a Time Lord to Rogue (Jonathan Groff) by showing digital scans of his previous regenerations, featured a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from Richard E. Grant, who portrayed the “Shalka Doctor” in a 2003 animated series. In the most recent issue of SFX Magazine (via GamesRadar), Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies spoke about how they brought the Shalka Doctor into the live-action fold, including bringing in Grant to do a photoshoot for the image used in the episode.

“We talked about that many times with [co-writers] Kate [Herron] and Briony [Redman],” Davies explained. “Just fun, a joke. It’s funny. It’s that simple. I sat here in this office with them and they just thought ‘an unknown Doctor’ – that’s what the script said because we had to work out who to get and how we could get him. He wasn’t paid the fee he would’ve been paid to be a Doctor, obviously. He was so up for it and went and did that, especially for us. Very last minute! Because we weren’t sure whether to do it or not, partly because we’re busy, and there was a lot of extra paperwork just to do that. But as we watched that parade of Doctors, we just sat and went, ‘We’ve got to put an extra one in, we’ve got to.’ That’s the fun of it.”

“I wrote to [writer] Paul Cornell the night before, saying, ‘Please watch tomorrow because there’s such a treat in store,’ and he was so delighted,” Davies revealed. “But it’s really nice when you can do things like that. That was a really nice moment between me and Paul, we’re old friends going back decades. It was lovely. A little bit of payment there because he created the Ninth Doctor with the Shalka and we completely replaced him with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. So, how nice all these years later, to take a little lean back and sort of say, the door’s open now, thanks to ‘The Timeless Child’, and you can come in and own your Doctor again. Really, it’s not just fun, it’s a nice thing to do.”

Who Did Richard E. Grant Play on Doctor Who?

Although Grant is far from the first or last actor to portray multiple characters on Doctor Who, having already played the Great Intelligence in Season 7, he does belong to an exclusive club of actors who have actually portrayed multiple Doctors. Grant first appeared in 1999’s The Curse of Fatal Death, a Red Nose Day-exclusive special that originally sought to parody the existing franchise, which had been on hiatus since 1996. Co-starring Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, Jonathan Pryce, and Joanna Lumley, The Curse of Fatal Death saw Grant play “The Quite Handsome Doctor,” who was technically the special’s version of the Tenth Doctor after Atkinson’s regenerated. While this special might not have been designed to be canon to the larger world of Doctor Who, it has been co-opted by Doctor Who Magazine and other pieces of the franchise’s fan media.

A few years later, Grant once again joined the franchise through the 2003 animated series Scream of the Shalka. In it, Grant voiced an alternate version of the Ninth Doctor, who has affectionally been dubbed the “Shalka Doctor” by the fandom in the years since. As with Grant’s Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death, the Shalka Doctor has not fully been believed to be canon to the main franchise, with fans safely assuming the events of Scream of the Shalka only existed in some sort of parallel universe.