Steven Moffat on discussions about Twelve's costume:
“We’ve had conversations over dinner. He came round to my house the other night, and I cooked him dinner. We had to do that because we couldn’t be seen out together. It’s been like having an affair! So he came round, and I had to cook. Oh the glamour! I made him a curry, and we discussed costumes in the lightest terms. But in the end, having sort of pratted about a bit in that area last time round with Matt, I discovered myself to be inept at costume discussions, so I tend to step away from that. I think it’s really important that the actor chooses what makes them feel like the Doctor, which is what Matt did in the end. He just tried on things until one day - very, very late - he discovered what made him feel the part. I fell in love with it later.”
Did the team get Peter and Jenna Louise Coleman together at any point, to see how they got on?
"No we didn’t do that," Steven confirms, "although we had all sorts of plans to do stuff like that. I said we’d get Peter round to my house to do the first audition, and after that we’d probably go ahead and do something with Jenna. But it was just irrelevant really. He’s such a great actor and he was so good, we just thought ‘Well, let’s not be silly, of course we’re going to cast him.’ Great actors always find their chemistry together, so they’ll be fine."
Russell T Davies reaction to Peter Capaldi's casting:
"I’d kept Peter’s number after we worked together on The Fires of Pompeii and Torchwood," Russell tells DWM the following morning. "And to be honest, you don’t do that with many actors. Life moves on. But I loved him as an actor, and a writer, and a director, I was actually in awe of him, and so clung to his number, in a slightly stalkerish way. Quite apart from his five million wonderful appearances on screen, I think that the scene in Episode 3 of Torchwood: Children of Earth, where Peter’s character faces the 456 for the first time, is one of the finest performances in anything ever. Seriously. Anything. Ever. But then I was as surprised as anyone on Sunday night! I’d heard rumours about Peter in the weeks beforehand, but I’d convinced myself it couldn’t be true, because he’s in The Musketeers. In fact, I was quite sad, because I thought about him a lot, and realised how good he’d be, and now we’d never get to see him. Damn. So the moment Zoe Ball said his name was actually quite mind-blowing. I still find it difficult, even now to find adjectives big and bold enough to describe how brilliant this is!
"So I texted him on Sunday, saying ‘Oh my God’. And imagine, just imagine how many texts he got that night. But then today, the phone went ping, and there he was. Doctor Who. On my mobile. And a new golden age begins! That’s four golden ages in a row now!"
Steven Moffat recounts his first meeting with Peter Capaldi in 2005:
"I was at a BBC party in a nice basement somewhere, with loud music and a lot of sweaty middle-aged people complaining about the loudness of the music. I was feeling a bit good about myself, because The Empty Child (which is now so long ago, Quatermass is in it) had gone down rather well, and people thought I could write drama. And at events like this people would always talk to me about Doctor Who, which I loved so much. People, I say - not generally Comedy Gods.
A saturnine figure detached himself from the shadows, and in a moment Malcolm Tucker was looming over me, extending his hand and for some reason insisting on the name Peter Capaldi.
I loved - and still love - The Thick of It. I was in awe. Because this extraordinary actor, this star several times over, knew my name! That sort of thing never happened to me, and I couldn’t understand it - but very soon everything became clear.
"Peter Capaldi is a Doctor Who fan," I told my wife in the taxi a few hours later.
“You mean he watches it.”
“No I mean he’s a fan. Like me.”
“Not like you.”
“Yes like me.”
“Really not.”
“Seriously.”
“…were you drinking?”
“Beside the point.”"
Moffat recounts how Peter Capaldi is still a fan of Doctor Who:
"Every now and then I’d bump into Peter at daft events - the Comedy Awards, the Scottish BAFTAs, the British (and therefore also Scottish) BAFTAs, and we’d always chat, and it was always about Doctor Who. Even in the months when Sherlock first went out, when everybody mentioned The Other Show first, Peter came looming up and said 'I know I should be talking about Sherlock, but I just love Matt Smith.'"
Moffat on the cast of Peter Capaldi:
"He was on Andy Pryor’s list, of course. He was at the top of mine. Brian Minchin sucked his pen a bit, because he’d worked with him on Children of Earth, and for a moment it was a bit of a leap - but only a moment! Capaldi! Capaldi was suddenly our big idea.
I asked my old friend Mark Gatiss to make me a list, and right at the top, again, was Peter Capaldi.
Cometh the moment, cometh the Doctor. You don’t have ideas - they just let you know when they’re ready.
No guarantees he’d go for the plan, of course. The man had a career on stage and screen, was a proper distinguished thespian, he’d probably want - ‘- to come and see us.’ Andy told us. Well, no Andy didn't tell us that at all. He emailed us at ten o’clock in the morning, informing us that he’d phone at three in the afternoon with exciting news. Then he told us.
Oh how that day flew by!
We were being top secret, of course, so the audition was held at my house. Oh and did you enjoy our Top Secrecy, by the way? No-one knew it would be Peter. Except the betting shops, the newspapers and people. There were as many photos of Peter in the papers the day before the reveal, as the day after. To the uninformed it must have looked like the continuing story of a man who shaved off his beard.
But anyway, I digress. Back in sequence, Moffat, enough of the Timey Wimey. The audition: it was one of those moments - the Doctor was in the room, and the search was over. Ben Stephenson and Faith Penhale agreed, and a phone call was made to the set of The Musketeers, to inform the great man that a big blue box was about to close around his life forever.
And so it was, on a very special day in Prague, that a Doctor Who fan, dressed as Cardinal Richelieu, who was probably wondering who the next Doctor would be, discovered to his great joy, than the Doctor, at long last, was him."
Letter from Peter Capaldi to Doctor Who Magazine:
