It Is Always Wrong to Want to Bone a David Tennant Character, Yet We Persist
Entertainment
David Tennant is the type O-negative of people, what my friend Charlie calls the universal boner. He is tall and sort of ginger, always shaved yesterday or the day before and has a very non-actorly habit of never looking directly at his scene partner, perhaps he might just be too rumpled and tired to do so. When he does make eye contact, it is always suddenly, with amber-colored eyes blazing and usually simultaneously yelling some English-adjacent Scottish noises. But when David Tennant finally does make eye contact, it is with an intensity that could be murderous or could be love. Often the scripts he chooses call for both simultaneously. And the whole combination is utterly, disarmingly charming enough to startle one, momentarily, away from whatever sexual preferences existed before and briefly replace them with a sexual preference for David Tennant and David Tennant only.
He is also what I consider to be the most efficient type of actor: one that develops a character early on in their career—in his case that of an accessibly handsome, tall, and often inexplicably shouty man whose clothes are usually too big—and then lets writers substitute in different backstories for that character rather than going to all the trouble of developing some new persona each time he gets a script in the mail from the BBC, something that, judging from his IMDb page, appears to happen roughly every three weeks. And at its base level, Tennant’s funny, yet volatile man who didn’t really mean what he just said schtick is one that he generally applies to every villain (or villain-adjacent) role he chooses, so much so that I have had at least a dozen conversations in which myself and other humans confess the first time we felt inappropriately attracted to David Tennant’s character and each subsequent time following.
For most, the moment came in realizing that they wanted to bone the Doctor as teenagers. For me, it was Barty Crouch Jr. Others had complicated, hard-to-process moments with Jessica Jones’s Kilgrave, and those people often need a patient ear from a veteran who has spent a lot of time with their thorny tangle of Tennant attraction. As per these conversations, I have scientifically broken down the roles most frequently played by David Tennant into three categories in order to best understand the inappropriateness of the attraction.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
