The man at the center of every Doctor Who revival rumor just weighed in, and he picked his words very carefully.
David Tennant discusses the BBC’s competitive tender in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine (issue 633, surfaced via the David Tennant Facebook page), where he floats the idea of a production company building its bid around “a particular performer” before insisting he’s not hinting at anything.
The comments land just days after Stargate producer Dean Devlin’s Electric Entertainment confirmed it wants to bid, following a report claiming Devlin would bring Tennant back as the Doctor.
‘It might be a way of luring in the BBC’
Asked about the directions the show could take, Tennant said the next era will likely be shaped by whoever wins the tender, before wandering into very familiar territory.
“Unless some production company decides to mount some bid around a particular performer, that would be a way forward, I suppose. If a writer or producer had a relationship with a particular actor⊠I don’t know. This is not me hinting at any insider knowledge,” he said.
He added: “I mean, it’d be a way of doing it, wouldn’t it? And it might be a way of luring in the BBC, if they got someone shiny.”
Here’s the thing: that scenario is not hypothetical. Per The Times, Devlin wants to build his pitch around bringing Tennant back, and Devlin is a producer with a relationship with this particular actor, having directed him in the 2018 thriller Bad Samaritan.
To be clear on the sourcing, Tennant never mentions Devlin, and magazine interviews are conducted well in advance, so the overlap may be pure coincidence. Which somehow makes it better.
Elsewhere in the same interview, Tennant says he’s open to playing the Fourteenth Doctor again, calling it “hard to imagine” that Fourteen’s retirement is really the end.
Tennant wants the next team to ‘think fresh’
Whoever wins, Tennant hopes they don’t play it safe.
“Whoever the new team are, [they] need to be able to think fresh and think new and not be too hidebound by expectations of what came before,” he said. “I guess you need to be inspired by the source material, and then you have your own take on it, just like Russell did back in 2005. The same show, but different.”
Notably, that echoes Mark Gatiss, who this week said the show needs fresh ideas and a boss who grew up with Tennant as the Doctor rather than Tom Baker.
‘The fire never went out’
Where Tennant splits from Gatiss is the doom. Gatiss predicted the tender will quietly fail like it did in 1989. Tennant looks at the same history and sees the opposite.
“Even in the gap between 1989 and 2005, either side of the Eighth Doctor TV movie, it kept going. The fire may have dimmed slightly, but it certainly never went out. It was always burning fiercely somewhere,” he said.
He added there’s nothing to indicate the show has gone away, saying it’s “just going to have a breath and come back in a different form” and that fans should “regard it as a positive” until there’s evidence to the contrary.
The evidence file, for the record
For now, the evidence runs the other way. Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf are out, the 2026 Christmas special is canceled, insiders say the show could stay shelved until 2028, and the tender still hasn’t opened.
The fire may well be burning somewhere. At the moment, nobody at the BBC is holding the torch. For the full rundown of the tender, the timeline, and who’s circling, here’s what’s next for Doctor Who.
