How Paul McGann Really Felt About Not Being Asked Back For Doctor Who In 2005
"Doctor Who" has a famously complicated release history. From its 1960s beginnings to the 2005 revival and the fun, cheesy, and heartfelt Disney+ "Doctor Who" era that kicked off in 2024, the franchise can seem extremely complex even without taking the Doctor's famous reincarnations into account. It gets to a point where even a simple "Doctor Who" beginner's guide on where to begin watching the long-running sci-fi classic now needs to offer multiple starting point options.
One of the British sci-fi gem's most notorious aspects is the 15-year hiatus the show took after Sylvester McCoy's exit. McCoy's seventh Doctor ended his tenure in December 1989, and the show didn't return until Christopher Eccleston's ninth Doctor took over in 2005. However, "Doctor Who" wasn't entirely absent in live-action during these years. In 1996, Paul McGann portrayed the eighth Doctor in the made-for-TV "Doctor Who: The Movie," clashing wits with an Eric Roberts incarnation of his mortal enemy, the Master. Knowing this, McGann — an accomplished TV and movie actor – might have seemed like a natural choice to kick off the show before the Doctor would regenerate into a brand new incarnation. Of course, this never came to be, and in a 2024 interview with Doctor Who Magazine, McGann discussed his feelings about not being called back:
"I was thinking, 'Am I suddenly going to get a phone call?' I was curious. I thought, 'Well, surely the tradition is that there's a regeneration.' I thought maybe they'd ask me to come and do a day on this thing. But no! [Laughs] That's proper 'sad actor' isn't it? When actors aren't working, they sit in a room, looking out of a window, waiting for the phone to ring. And that was me for all those years. And the phone didn't ring!"
McGann's eighth Doctor received his flowers after all
Though Paul McGann didn't get to kick off the "Doctor Who" revival series with a nice regeneration scene, his eighth Doctor has actually been one of the more prominent ones in the history of the series. Ever since the 1996 movie, McCann's Doctor started appearing in a veritable arsenal of novels, comic books, and a lengthy series of audio stories and podcasts — where McCann, of course, has played the role. In the Doctor Who Magazine interview, McGann described finding out the full extent of his character's involvement in "Doctor Who" lore:
"After a while, they were up and running with the TV series, and we carried on [doing audio dramas for Big Finish Productions]. But that's when these other layers suddenly began to appear. Around the same time, I was being educated about the presence of the novels and the artwork stories. There were all these different levels of it ..."
The layers, McGann would eventually discover, even extended to live-action. In 2013, he finally got to film that regeneration scene for a BBC "Doctor Who" short called "The Night of the Doctor" ... although, true to "Doctor Who" form, his eighth Doctor didn't regenerate directly into Eccleston's ninth Doctor. Instead, the franchise introduced a hitherto unknown incarnation known as the War Doctor (John Hurt). Like McGann's version, Hurt's War Doctor only had one major live-action appearance, but went on to have many audio drama adventures that elaborated on his character. That's the beauty of this unique time-travel show, really — you never know where any given Doctor may turn up.