New Doctor Who companion Millie Gibson: ‘There are so many controversial elements to this season – it’s what we need’

Anyone who’s ever braved a spray tan knows there are rules that must be followed. Number one? Avoid water in the immediate aftermath, or risk being plagued by awkward streaks. That means no showers, no rain storms, and definitely no tears. So when, one evening last year, a freshly tanned Millie Gibson picked up her phone to learn she’d been cast as Doctor Who’s new companion, Ruby Sunday, her immediate priority “was not to cry it off”, she laughs. “I thought: ‘They’re not going to be able to redo my face, so I’m going to have to hold this in!’”

The night in question occurred just before the National Television Awards in October 2022, and Gibson, now 19, was preparing to walk the red carpet with her Coronation Street castmates. She’d played trouble-prone teen Kelly Neelan on the ITV soap since 2019, but had decided at the start of the year to leave her steady gig on the cobbles. “I’d thought: ‘I’m so young, why the hell not? I’ve not got a mortgage, I’ve not got kids, not got anyone to pay. So if it does go wrong, at least I’ll have tried it.’” Her final episodes had aired just a few weeks earlier. Then came “a group call from all three of my agents”, she recalls. “Whenever you get that, it either means you’ve been cancelled or you’ve got an amazing part.” Thankfully, it was the latter. “They said, ‘Can you keep a secret?’” Keeping quiet when she reunited with the Corrie gang the next day was “like torture”, she admits. “But even after a drink, I held it in.”

Gibson comes across over Zoom, on a chilly Manchester morning, as strikingly, well, normal – every potentially starry anecdote countered by a touch of self-deprecation. She’s back home during a break from filming more Doctor Who in Cardiff, dressed in a grey Carhartt jumper adorned with a letter “M” pendant; her blonde hair, cut short into a bob they’ll probably soon start calling “the Ruby”, is tied back.

The dawn of a new Doctor Who era is always big news, but this time, the anticipation is palpable. Incoming Doctor Ncuti Gatwa, beloved for his Bafta-nominated turn as the sunny, quip-tastic Eric Effiong in Netflix’s Sex Education, is the first Black actor to take on the role in the show’s 60-year history. And Russell T Davies, the screenwriter responsible for some of the most acclaimed seasons in the recent Who canon (he oversaw the series from its 2005 revival until David Tennant’s 2010 departure) is back as showrunner. In another first, Disney+ will be streaming the show around the world, and its name on the credits inevitably means a generous boost to the budget: Davies has admitted that the anniversary specials starring Tennant and Catherine Tate cost “more than most things I’ve made for the past 10 years added together”.

No pressure, then. In her soap days, Gibson jokes, people would often look at her quizzically in the street, as if to ask: “Do I know you from somewhere? Are you someone’s ex-girlfriend?” But when her first episode airs on 25 December, she’ll be on the path to household name status, joining the ranks of Who companions such as Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, Jenna Coleman and Karen Gillan. It was Gibson’s dad who introduced her to the show, and she still remembers sitting down to watch Gillan zipping through space and time with 11th Doctor Matt Smith. So when she got the gig, she “reached out to [Gillan] because I am such a fangirl. She replied and was just really supportive, and gave me so much amazing advice.”

Being a companion, she says, is like being part of “a community that only people who have experienced it understand”. When her casting was announced during last year’s Children in Need broadcast, the then Doctor Jodie Whittaker’s name “just popped up on my phone, too”, with a congratulatory message she describes as “like a hug in a text”.

Gibson grew up in Broadbottom, a village in Tameside, Greater Manchester, with two older brothers. No one in her family is in the entertainment industry, she says, but “personality-wise, they’re quite creative” and always encouraged her dramatic tendencies. “In lockdown we found all my baby videos and started watching them. And oh my gosh, [being an] actress was definitely in the blood from early on,” she smiles. “I watched them thinking, ‘Oh my God, what did you do with me when I was younger?’ I was playing CBBC presenters with my mum, and doing plays for them.”

At 11, she joined Oldham Theatre Workshop, a drama school that counts the likes of House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke, Anna Friel and Sarah Lancashire among its former pupils, and where she “learned how to get confident and really act, instead of just playing make-believe”. Institutions like this, she says, are “a dying art”, with some drama lessons moving online. “Especially in the North, I’d say it’s becoming a lot less of a thing… People are trying to get in [to OTW] and they can’t because it’s too full. That’s a great thing as well, but there need to be more [places like these].”

It was during a performance at the Theatre Workshop that she was scouted by an agent, leading to parts in the CBBC show Jamie Johnson and shows such as ITV’s Butterfly. Getting work so young, however, was far from easy. “I was in year 9, and that’s when girls are most mean, going through the [teenage] hormones,” she says. “I remember coming back and saying, ‘Hi guys, what have I missed?’ and then no one talked to me for months. I told my mum, ‘I can’t do another audition because the girls won’t talk to me again.’” She ponders. “Being a child actor is so hard.”

But despite those wobbles, there was little doubt she’d eventually commit to acting full-time, and not long afterwards she landed the Corrie role. Was it tough, I ask, balancing the micro-dramas of teenage life with the, well, actual drama of the Street, and the gruelling schedule that involved? During her soap years, Gibson says, her castmates were her actual mates, which made things a lot easier. The way she tells it, the show’s green room sounds enjoyably farcical, like the set-up for a very meta sitcom.

“It was funny seeing [co-stars] come in and they’d have a big bloody gash on their head. It’d be like, ‘Oh, are you alright, what are you doing today?’ ‘I just got hit by a car!’ ‘Oh lovely, right. What’s on the menu for lunch?’ … It was like a comedy sketch sometimes.” When her storylines started to ramp up and become more intense as she got older, she adds, she dropped out of college.

She learned she was up for the role of Ruby on her last day on Coronation Street, when she was “feeling a little bit sorry for myself, wondering if I’d made the right decision”. Davies has said it was Gibson’s versatility on Coronation Street that made her a perfect fit for the genre-hopping role of the Doctor’s companion. “He was like, ‘I remember watching Millie hold her stepdad hostage and deal drugs and win Hairdresser of the Year, all in one episode,’” she grins.

Secrecy around the forthcoming episodes is tight: so tight that even the cast weren’t always aware how plots were going to pan out. So what can she actually tell us about her debut, without getting mired in spoilers? “Ruby has a relationship with the Doctor that I don’t think the audience has necessarily seen before … She really humanises him and balances him to be more like her, really – more innocent and pure and human, which is so beautiful to watch,” Gibson says. And, she teases, “there’s a hidden secret with [Ruby] that rolls throughout the whole series”.

Intriguing stuff – and Gibson’s admission that this season “has an element of Black Mirror in it, not so much at the start, but it definitely grows darker” will almost certainly pique the interest of Whovians, too. She reckons the new episodes “will attract a lot of Gen Z” viewers, as they “go with the times and represent a lot of faces and themes that are really important to see on television”. Davies, of course, has long been praised for his commitment to inclusive storytelling, especially his spotlighting of LGBT+ stories, from Queer As Folk to It’s a Sin. His anniversary specials featured a trans teenage girl, Rose, played by Heartstopper’s Yasmin Finney – prompting 144 complaints from viewers (admittedly a tiny proportion of the 7.6 million who tuned in overall).

I was crying my eyes out to a tennis ball for three hours

The outrage brigade will probably continue to clutch their pearls as the new series progresses. “There’s so many controversial elements to this season – the good sort of controversy – and it’s what we need to see on our tellies,” Gibson says. “Some people,” she adds, “might think, ‘This isn’t the Doctor Who I know.’ But I’m really excited to see it … It’s really cool that they’re doing concepts like these and changing it up.”

Working with CGI creatures after the realism of Corrie was also a learning curve. The majority of Doctor Who’s aliens, Gibson points out, have been made using practical effects, but she still had to undergo the modern sci-fi actor’s rite of passage: emoting to an inanimate object on a stick. “I was crying my eyes out to a tennis ball. It’s little things like that where I’m like, ‘What am I doing with my life? Why’ve I just been crying for three hours straight to a tennis ball?’ Things like that are definitely a challenge, but all worth it.” You don’t do much of that down the Rovers, certainly.

Gibson is well aware of what might lie ahead, judging by the post-Who careers of former companions. Piper’s stage work has earned her an Olivier award, Gillan is a Marvel mainstay, and Coleman crops up in countless prestige dramas. Gibson, meanwhile, would jump at the chance to work with Jodie Comer (“She’s a goddess!”) in the future, and after going through “such an obsession with Fleabag” she’d love to get stuck into something “as dark, humorous and juicy as that”. But right now, her first order of business is sitting down to watch her debut episode with her close family after dinner on Christmas Day (her brother, she says, has been watching the entire back catalogue just to make sure he’s fully prepared). “We’re going to have a lot of prosecco involved, just in case it doesn’t go very well,” she jokes. I’m sure she has absolutely nothing to worry about. 

‘The Church on Ruby Road’ is broadcast on Christmas Day at 5.55pm on BBC One

Styling by Cher Coulter, make-up by Sara Hill and hair by Narad Kutowaroo