Ncuti Gatwa: The exuberant Sex Education star’s rise to Doctor Who

“Sometimes talent walks through the door and it’s so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars,” said Russell T Davies last weekend.

He was discussing how actor Ncuti Gatwa had “dazzled” him in his audition to be the new Time Lord in Doctor Who. Gatwa, 29, was announced as the successor to Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor on Sunday 8 May – news that set social media alight as soon as it broke.

“WHAT A BOOKING. DOCTOR NCUTI!” squealed Radio 1 DJ Greg James.

“I don’t know a single thing about that time travelling phone box but for Ncuti?? I’m now invested,” wrote actor Kelechi Okafor.

“Congratulations to this ray of sunshine,” Gatwa’s Sex Education co-star Gillian Anderson said.

Gatwa will be the 14th actor and the first Black man to play the Doctor in the beloved, long-running science-fiction franchise.

Speaking about diversity casting, Gatwa said of the Time Lord: “He is literally an alien – ‘they’ are an alien. And so they can regenerate into anything and anyone…

“I feel like anyone can put themselves in those shoes. The Doctor is not from anywhere. They don’t fit in anywhere and I think for marginalised people they have been a real beacon of feeling seen in a way.

“They are someone that can help people escape, which I love.”

Ncuti Gatwa (Carlo Paloni/BAFTA/Shutterstock)

Ahead of Gatwa stepping into the Tardis and adventuring through time and space, here’s what we know about the actor’s rise to become the new master of the Whoniverse…

The actor’s early years

Gatwa was born in Nyarugenge, Rwanda, in 1992. Aged two, he moved with his family to Edinburgh during the 1994 genocide.

In a 2020 interview, he told The Independent that his family were one of “like three black families in the whole of Edinburgh”, adding: “I was quite an easy target in a state Scottish high school. I grew up in a working-class area, and I stood out – for my voice, my appearance, I did dance and things like that. But I always had faith in my charm. I always had faith in my charisma.”

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At the weekends, Gatwa, whose father was a minister, would go to church. Gatwa was sent to bible study until the age of 15, but speaking about his relationship with religion, he said: “I have faith, but I’m not the biggest fan of organised religion. There’s a lot of hypocrites in church. A lot of hypocrites.”

The family lived in university accommodation while Gatwa’s father studied for a PhD in philosophy and theology. His father was later forced leave the family and move to Cameroon because he was unable to get work as an academic in the UK.

Gatwa first thought about becoming an actor at the age of 17, when a drama teacher told him he was talented.

When he left school in Edinburgh, Gatwa trained at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (where former Time Lord David Tennant also trained) before moving to London. In England, his accent baffled people.

“People have tried to fight me,” he told The Independent. “There’ve been times when I’ve been on a night out and people ask me where I’m from… The amount of times I’ve almost been beaten up for saying I’m Scottish. It’s given me an identity crisis.”

He added: “People really cannot understand the concept of a black boy in a tracksuit in London being from Scotland. People think I’m taking the piss. I’m like, ‘Stop taking my Scottishness away. You don’t define me.’”

In London, he worked as a temp in Harrods and shared a friend’s bed after draining all the money he had saved. Gatwa opened up about his experience of not having his own home and losing weight because he couldn’t afford to eat in a piece he wrote for The Big Issue in 2020.

His best roles – and what the critics have said

Gatwa’s screen career began in 2014, with the role of “Male Customer” in the short-lived BBC Four sitcom Bob Servant. In 2016, he appeared in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe as Demetrius, one of the play’s four young lovers.

But his big break came in 2019 with Netflix’s hit teen show Sex Education. Speaking about how the series changed his life overnight, he told The Independent: “[The day it was released] I hopped onto a plane with 500 Instagram followers. Eight hours later, I hopped off the plane with a couple hundred thousand.”

Ncuti Gatwa and Asa Butterfield in ‘Sex Education’ (Netflix)

In the show, Gatwa plays Eric Effiong, the irrepressible best friend of Asa Butterfield’s Otis Milburn. The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard wrote of Gatwa’s character: “Eric, in particular, struck a chord when the show premiered – not just with those enamoured by his ebullience and killer wardrobe, but by people who had rarely, if ever, seen themselves on screen before.”

The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan, meanwhile, wrote: “All the performances in Sex Education are absolute wonders, by the way, but Gatwa is something particularly special. He is real, unaffected, joyful, with perfect timing and understated emotional heft. I hope this is the breakout appearance for him it promises to be: I want more of him on my screen as soon as possible.”

In a show that has launched the careers of exceptional actors such as Emma Mackey, Connor Swindells and Aimee Lou Wood, it is all the more impressive that Gatwa was called the “scene-stealer” by Radio Times and the show’s “true star” by Metro.

What the future holds

Gatwa is one of several Sex Education stars who will be appearing alongside Margot Robbie in Greta Gerwig’s much-hyped Barbie film, which is expected to hit cinemas in July 2023.

Sex Education is coming back for a fourth series – but it’s currently unknown whether Gatwa’s role in Doctor Who will get in the way of him reprising his role as Eric.

The new series of Doctor Who will arrive on screens in 2023. Gatwa is excited to get started.

At the Baftas last weekend, he said: “I feel really happy that I can now talk about it because I got cast in February and I have been keeping it a secret since then. So it is nice to finally breathe. But I’m also really nervous.”