The Major Doctor Who Rule That Ncuti Gatwa Accidentally Broke

The Fifteenth Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, has broken a lot of unofficial rules already in his time on the show. His character has bucked conventions by not sticking to a single outfit, and by shedding tears seemingly whenever something sad happens. (Some fans hate that, but I for one appreciate a Doctor who’s in touch with his emotions.) There is one rule Gatwa won’t break though, at least not any more: he will not curse while dressed as the Doctor.

“The only time I’ve ever gotten in trouble for anything was when I swore (while wearing) a ‘Doctor Who’ costume,” he recalled in a recent interview with Radio Times (via Express). “I got called into Russell (T. Davies)’s office… And he let me know that that’s not acceptable. He said, ‘Do what you want when you’re out of costume, but when you’re in costume, do not let us catch you swearing.'”

It’s an interesting rule, in part because it’s easy to not even notice that the Doctor never swears. It makes sense given that ‘Doctor Who’ is a family-friendly show, but even “Harry Potter” managed to throw in a “b***h’ or two. But even though the Doctor does occasionally say mild swear words like “hell” or “damn,” he’s otherwise kept it very PG. There’s even a canon explanation for this: in one of the New Series Adventures books, “Only Human,” the Ninth Doctor explains how the TARDIS’s translation circuit has a swear filter, preventing any passengers from hearing any words that cross into the obscene. It’s a lot like how the NBC show “The Good Place” gets around swearing, with metaphysical forces converting “s***” to “shirt” and “f***” to “fork.”

Maybe the Doctor has been cursing like a sailor this whole time, and the TARDIS has been sparing our ears.

Gatwa took his conversation with Davies well, saying, “I was like, fair enough. And I guess that was a lesson … For the last four years I’ve been co-leading an X-rated showand so I’m on a constant journey of learning what it is to be a PG role model and the lead of a family show.”

It may seem silly to expect the main actor to stay at least partially in character whenever he’s dressed up as the Doctor, but this attitude of keeping things real behind the scenes has been around since the ’60s. William Hartnell, who played the first Doctorfamously insisted on memorizing what the buttons on the TARDIS console did, and he made sure to stay consistent about it throughout the show. The 2013 biopic about him, “An Adventure of Time and Space,” features Hartnell telling producer Verity Lambert why he needs time to rehearse on the TARDIS set:

“I need time to plot out all the buttons, you see … All the switches and dials. I need to know what they all do, don’t I? What if I press something to close the doors and the next week I use to blow us all up! … The children will spot it, you see, if we try and fudge it.”

Although “Doctor Who” has changed a lot in the sixty years since, that consideration towards the kid viewers has always stayed. Even when the cameras are off, the “Doctor Who” crew take their job seriously. They very much seem to understand that they’ve got millions of child fans looking up to them, and they don’t want to let them down.