Peter Capaldi Just Shared Why He Really Left Doctor Who

Peter Capaldi, who was the 12th Doctor on BBC hit Doctor Who, has spoken out about his exit from the show.

The Thick Of It Star left the franchise in 2017. In a recent appearance on YouTube series 100 Questions with John Simmons, he claimed that he decided to leave the role because “I just wasn’t sure that it was going to go in the direction that I... everybody was leaving that I’d worked with.” 

He added, “Everybody was leaving. Jenna [presumably Jenna Louise-Coleman, who played the Doctor’s companion Clara Oswald] had gone, and Steven [probably former head writer Steven Moffat, who also left in 2017] was going, and Brian [likely Brian Minchin], the producer, was going, and those are the people that make it work for you.

“We’d had some talks about the direction. I wasn’t sure that that was where I wanted to go with the show. And I also thought, I’m not sure I could come up with anything new.” 

Peter continued to say that while his regeneration, which saw the actor replaced by Jodie Whittaker, was “very sad”, he thinks that the biological process the Doctor uses to survive serious damage has become “diminished”. 

Calling the concept “a very, very powerful death motif,” he said, “To be perfectly honest, I think there are too many regenerations.

“I love all the Doctors, but I’ve lost count now of how many of them there are, so the weight of this kind of regeneration is diminished. Whereas when I grew up as a kid, the first time it happened it was: ‘What just happened there?’ It was mysterious and strange. It holds the mystery of the show, the regeneration.”

It’s not the first time he’s expressed his feelings about the show, of which he was a super-fan in his youth.

On the Half Of The Picture podcast this year, he claimed: “The show became very, very big. And it was never like that when I loved it. So it became a different thing. 

“I think the show is a little bit of a victim of its success. You know, the show that I loved was a tiny thing, a little small thing that survived. It just survived, but nobody knew that it was warming its way into the culture in such a deep way. And I think that’s what I have an affinity with.”

In the ’70s, the Doctor Who fan club received so much correspondence from a young Capaldi that then-president of the group, Keith Miller, said he felt “haunted” by the Doctor-to-be.