Why Ncuti Gatwa’s Accent Matters In ‘Doctor Who’

Rwandan-Scottish actor and beloved Sex Education alumni, Ncuti Gatwa is now playing the Doctor, the titular Time Lord lead of Doctor Who — and he’s doing it with his natural accent. 

Despite being a time traveling alien on the run, the Doctor has almost always looked and sounded like a white person from the UK. Co-created by Sydney Newman and Cecil Webber, with the help of Donald Wilson, Doctor Who was conceived for the BBC as a family-friendly science fiction series. One that would use time travel to teach audiences about British history and science, with the show’s protagonist as a wise eccentric guide.

Like every other program on the BBC in the ’60s, Doctor Who actors were directed to speak in Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as “BBC voice”. RP was also called “the Queen’s English” and is characterised by an upper-class British accent used by the wealthy and educated. For decades, it was the only accent spoken on the BBC. 

Naturally, this somewhat unofficial policy prioritising RP accents shaped whose voices were heard on TV and radio in the UK as much as any other institutional bias. An accent so closely tied to wealth limited opportunities for working-class, non-white, and regional British presenters and actors in the first half of the 20th century.

So it was unthinkable that a character like the Doctor, an almost all-knowing expert on history and science, wouldn’t sound posh as hell. Not until 2005 when Christopher Eccleston portrayed the Doctor did the character speak in a non-RP accent. Eccleston used his natural Mancunian accent for the character and fought hard to do so with Doctor Who producers at the time. 

The actor told Radio Times in 2018, “‘I wanted to move him away from RP (received pronunciation) for the first time because we shouldn’t make a correlation between intellect and accent, although that still needs addressing”. Scottish actor and known DILF David Tennant would succeed Eccleston in the role in 2006. Notably, returning the Doctor to their RP roots.

Almost 10 years would pass before another non-RP Doctor swaggered on-screen. Award-winning Scottish actor Peter Capaldi became the first to use a Scottish accent for the role in 2014, being the third Scottish actor in the role after Sylvester Mccoy and Tennant. 

In 2018, Jodie Whittaker made history as the first woman to take on the role. Hailing from West Yorkshire, the actress also used her natural accent for the Time Lord for the entirety of her run. However, this didn’t necessarily improve the reception for her era. 

But it wouldn’t be until the year of our lord 2023, that an actor with a non-British accent would use their voice in the role. Ncuti Gatwa took up the mantle of playing the Doctor this year, the first actor born outside of the UK to do so.

Gatwa was born in Rwanda and escaped the Rwandan genocide to Scotland with his family in 1994. His accent is blended; a mix of his family’s West African roots and his Scottish home — it’s a delightful distinct voice he’s going to bring to Doctor Who’s lead role. On growing up Black in Scotland and later moving to London, Gatwa told the Independent in 2020, “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.’”

When Doctor Who was created 60 years ago, it wasn’t created to be a vision of the then-present or even the future. It wasn’t created with actors like Gatwa in mind. If anything, Doctor Who was conceived to project a very particular set of British ideals. Ideals which assured viewers that, in all of time and space, there’s always a white British person around who knows better than everyone. For all the show’s potential for change, the series wouldn’t even permit its alien main character to sound Scottish for 50 years — let alone be a different race or gender. 

Gatwa’s Doctor, even with just the 10 minutes of screen time he’s had so far, represents a long-awaited radical shift in how Doctor Who projects its heroic intelligent protagonist. For the first time, that idea doesn’t belong to a white person from Britain, but a Black Queer Scottish immigrant. For the first time, the Doctor speaks to the millions of us who grew up with and around blended ethnic accents, rather than to the British upper crust. 

With his lovely voice, Ncuti Gatwa finally breaks Doctor Who free from the problematic idea it has always inherently pushed: that the most intelligent person in any room is a narrow reflection of whiteness, Britishness, and wealth. Some might say that an accent isn’t that big of a deal, but an accent is a voice, and the kinds of voices we amplify are always going to matter.