David Tennant was one of the most popular actors to ever play The Doctor on The BBC’s Doctor Who, and starting tonight, we’ll get to meet him as a new character – sort of.
His new series Gracepoint – a 10-part murder mystery – begins tonight at 9PM ET on FOX, and in it, Tennant plays Emmett Carver. If this role seems similar to his role as Alec Hardy on Broadchurch, there’s a reason for that: Gracepoint is a North American remake.
Tennant participated in a conference call last week to tell the press about his new series.
“We’re really out to tell this story to an audience who, broadly speaking, haven’t seen it yet,” Tennant said of bringing Broadchurch to a new audience in a different setting. “Broadchurch was obviously a bit of the sensation back here in the UK, and I think that’s what brought it to the attention of FOX. It got a very loyal and very enthusiastic following on BBC America. There’s a huge populist audience who haven’t seen it yet, and that I think is what we’re principally aiming at,” he said. Did he intend to change anything? “I didn’t set out to change anything particularly,” he said. “I just tried to tell the story as it came up and through the script, and be as truthful and loyal to that as possible.”
“I think Hardy and Carver are very different, actually,” Tennant said about his two characters. “They certainly feel very different in my bones. Obviously, they look quite similar. They are following the trail of an investigation which has many similarities, but they feel different to me. It’s probably for others to make a list of quite how obvious those differences might be. That’s not really my principal concern. I just want to tell this fantastic story as truthfully and as honestly as I can, I suppose.”
Might Tennant’s lack of his usual Scottish accent throw viewers for a loop? “Well if they’re fans of Doctor Who, I didn’t use a Scottish accent in that, either,” Tennant reminded the caller. “I used an English accent in that. I don’t imagine that’s an issue. I think doing different accents is part of the job of acting really. It’s something else that I quite enjoy the challenge of, to be honest,” he continued.
“Preparing for an American accent, I think just about in every corner of the globe, we’re brought up watching American movies, so it’s something that we all have some kind of ear for, I guess. Obviously, it’s something that you take seriously, and you work with dialect coaches and experts to help you, and then you just practice until it’s kind of in your bones, really, so that it’s not something you’re thinking about when you’re on set every day. You do your homework and then you wind it up and let it go, I suppose. It’s part of what actors do. I always like seeing people transforming themselves in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that. An accent, obviously, it’s to do with the way your mouth works and the sounds that come out of your head, but somehow it informs everything about you, I think. If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. I think it’s part of trying to find what makes a character and it’s probably one of the things that, because I’ve done a character very similar to this in the British show that preceded Gracepoint, I guess this is, the accent, is one of the things that helps define what’s different about this incarnation of this particular character I guess,” he explained.
Why should audiences tune in tonight? “On one level, it’s a whodunit and the sort of spine of that is something that I think is familiar to us from many TV shows and movies of the past. There’s a very strong whodunit in there. There’s the procedural element of cops trying to solve a case. I think what gives it an extra texture and really makes it something rather special is the way that the characters are drawn so beautifully. There’s so much texture going on, that we get to understand the lives of all the different characters that get drawn into this and the impact of the event; the death of Danny Solano, which starts the whole ball running, which is the inciting incident in the show. It’s not just another TV cop show death. We really understand the impact of that, and we really understand what that would mean to a small community such as Gracepoint,” he said.
“The repercussions of that are followed through. I think it’s very hard to watch the first episode without your heart breaking for the family, actually. That’s helped by the fact that they’re played by Michael Pena and Virginia Kull, who both really take you on this harrowing, awful journey of two parents who lose a child. That, in itself, is about one of the worst things that human beings can imagine,” he continued. “It doesn’t shy away from really showing you what the true repercussions of that will be. That really follows through the whole series. It’s very honest. It’s very candid, and yet at the same time, it’s a thriller as well. It just takes you on the journey. It kind of grabs you and takes you on this journey, which is a bewildering and thrilling and grueling and gruesome, and yet, at the same time, I think impossible to turn off. I think it’s a compelling story. I think it’s been brilliantly told. I’m just very pleased to be a part of it.”
Gracepoint premieres tonight (October 2) at 9PM on FOX. Visit our Gracepoint hub for photos, spoilers and more!
