Like many people on this side of the Atlantic, I first encountered David Tennant as the 10th Doctor. (Well, I say many people. I really mean "many nerds" but that's beside the point.) I'd tolerated Eccleston--being told by my then husband that Doctor Who was a thing and we had to experience this thing--but I hadn't really loved him. Then along came Tennant, and my whole experience of the Doctor changed.
Oh Doctor, my Doctor...
I adored the 10th Doctor. He had more depth and breadth than the 9th (as well as, I was sadly going to learn, the 11th and 12th). He had a complexity of character that made him more believable as a long-lived Time Lord. Matt Smith was goofily charming, and Peter Capaldi certainly has the whole brilliantly weird thing down, but Tennant could be both of those things, as well as a host of others. He was, by turns, a fearsome man plagued by demons, a romantic charmer, and a madcap genius.
In short, he was fucking brilliant, and when the 10th Doctor died I actually refused to watch the new seasons for almost a year, because I wasn't ready to let him go yet.
It helped, in no small part, to realize that Tennant has a massive body of work out there for anyone willing to go digging around to find it. And while my original obsession was with the character of the Doctor, the more of his work I watched the more I transferred my allegiance to the actor himself.
Don't get me wrong. Ten will always be my Doctor. But that is now something wholly and completely separate from my affection for Tennant.
In a kilt. You're welcome.
Not many actors are truly versatile enough to play anything. That's part of the reason so many of them get pigeonholed into a particular type of roll. It's just what they're good at. Even those that aren't pigeonholed still generally have at least a few genres they don't do very well. Those performers who seem able to play anything are rare. Meryl Streep comes to mind. So does Tom Cruise (although I don't care for the man personally, I can't deny he's brilliant.) David Tennant is of their caliber, and it kills me, because almost no one here (aka: in the country where I live) knows it.
I've seen him in romances, dramas, psychological thrillers, comedies, modern films and Shakespearean plays, and the man is good in all of them. It's ridiculous.
Take his most recent turn as Kilgrave, in Jessica Jones. The man played a psychopathic serial murder/rapist/torturer/all around "who the fuck is actually this evil" kind of guy, which should have made every single person on the planet loathe the character to the very depths of their being, and yet... Kilgrave was charming. He was amusing. He was pitiable. We all knew he needed to die, but in the end we were sorry to see him go. NOT EVERY ACTOR CAN MAKE YOU FEEL THAT! It's a complicated line to walk, and holy shit, Tennant is good at it.
If you could do what I could do, you would do it too.
So come jump on the David Tennant bandwagon with me. Take a look at Cassanova, or, if you just want to cry, watch Single Father. His Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate is amazing, and if you need a good giggle go ahead and watch Fright Night. You can just fast forward to the scenes he's in. That's what I did.
C'mon. Drink the Kool-Aid. You won't regret it.
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