According to The Hollywood Reporter, David Tennant (Good Omens, Marvel’s Jessica Jones) talks about how he almost didn’t take on the role of the Doctor in BBC’s Doctor Who. Tennant shared in a recent episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast with… that his previous agent had told him not to.

As per The Hollywood Reporter, Tenant’s wife Georgia Tennant (Doctor Who: Dreamland, The Sandman) as host on the latest episode on the podcast recalled how David was asked to play the role of the Doctor when he met executive producers Russell T. Davies (Torchwood, It’s a Sin) and Julie Gardner (Othello, The Sarah Jane Adventures) while working on the 2005 miniseries Casanova. 

“And then they go, ‘Guess what? Do you want to play the Doctor?’” she recounted. “And you pretend to think about it for like a day or something?”

“It was longer than that,” David responded, before his wife added that he was “clearly” going to take the part.

“Well, maybe I was clearly going to do it,” the Jessica Jones actor admitted, “but there was definitely a moment where I wasn’t.”

David continued, “About 40 hours after they asked me, and I sort of had to process everything that it meant. And I had an agent at the time who was like, ‘Don’t touch it. It’s not going to work.’ Not my current agent. A previous brilliant agent who’s since retired, but she didn’t call that correctly, as it turns out. She said, ‘It’s not been on yet, it’s not going to work. You don’t want that hung around your neck.’”

Doctor Who is a British science fiction series that spans multiple seasons and storylines. The series follows the Doctor an alien who travels through time and space on different adventures to fight evil.

Doctor Who is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+. The Newest season in the franchise stars Ncuti Gatwa (Masters of the Air, The Last Letter from Your Lover) as the Doctor.