New Doctor Who wing-woman, Jenna-Louise Coleman, admits that landing the high-profile role was largely down to luck.
The 25-year-old actress had auditioned for a show codenamed Men On Waves, when she began to have suspicions about the true identity of the programme.
“I worked out that Men On Waves is an anagram of Woman Seven, because this is the seventh series. Weirdly, seven is my lucky number and this is my seventh job,” she told the Radio Times.
Having progressed to further audition rounds, she had to keep her involvement in the process top secret.
“I wasn’t allowed to say it was Doctor Who at any point – not talking to my agent, not when I arrived at the audition, and I certainly couldn’t tell anyone at all what I was up to next,” she said.
Following her appearance as murderous lesbian in the ITV1 soap Emmerdale, Coleman says she found it hard to find work and had been turned down for numerous roles before she hit the jackpot. She had also suffered a rejection from Rada.
“It’s very easy for people to put you in a box and I’ve been fighting very hard against that,” she said.
“In Emmerdale, I murdered somebody and in Waterloo Road, I murdered somebody so now I’m hoping to have fun. Lots of it.”
Showrunner Steven Moffat has been even more cryptic than usual about Coleman’s character in the seventh series.
Speaking to The Guardian last week, he said: “Who she’s playing, how the Doctor meets her, and even where he finds her are all part of one of the biggest mysteries the Time Lord ever encounters. Even by the Doctor’s standards, this isn’t your usual boy meets girl.”
Watch the trailer here:
