It’s safe to say that David Tennant is one of the most adored actors to have played Doctor Who, but before he took the role, his agent was insistent that it would be a huge mistake.

On the latest episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast With…, the actor spoke with his wife, Georgia Tennant, about the beginning of his Doctor Who career. “Things aren’t working out with [ninth Doctor] Christopher Eccleston, something goes wrong there, they’re looking for a new Doctor. ‘Doctor Who’ hasn’t even been on yet though, so we don’t know if this is going to be a hit or a damn squib,” Georgia Tennant said. “But they come to you, they sort of lure you to the house with, ‘Come watch a bit of an episode.’ You go along and then they go, ‘And guess what! Do you want to play it?’ And you pretend to think about it for like a day or something.“

While David Tennant agreed that he was “clearly going to do it,” he admitted that there was a moment when it “definitely” wasn’t going to happen. “I sort of had to process everything that it meant, and I had an agent at the time that was like, ‘Don’t touch it, it’s not going to work,’” he said. “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 going to work, you don’t want to have that hung around your neck.’“

To be fair to Tennant’s agent, it must have seemed like a risky move at the time. The sci-fi series had been off the air for over fifteen years, and the first season of the revival had yet to air.

Tennant played the Tenth Doctor over the course of three seasons and a handful of specials. He also returned in The Day of the Doctor alongside Matt Smith and even played the Fourteenth Doctor in three specials in 2023. Tennant will likely always be remembered as the Doctor, and adjusting to that level of fame was challenging. “It takes a bit of getting used to, for sure,” Tennant explained. “Suddenly, you’ve got to establish what the rules are for yourself and there’s not really anyone to help you or teach you … It’s just that sense of it all getting away from you very quickly. At its worst, that’s quite panic-inducing because you just feel exposed, you just feel very vulnerable.“