Jodie Whittaker is hyped for the World Cup. Although her family home in north London (Gooners, FYI) will be split into UK and US camps — her husband Christian Contreras is American-Hispanic — like all of us, she’s hoping England will finally be able to bring it home. After brilliant close calls in recent years, she’s been thinking about what we miss as a nation when we focus on commiserating. “Everyone, like me, only ever remembers the shit bit,” she says. “It’s such an English thing. We never bloody remember all the bits in between that were amazing. We just remember the headline: ‘Didn’t win’.”
If it feels a little out of character for Whittaker — one of the UK’s most in-demand actors, with a career that stretches from a bereaved mother in Broadchurch to Black Mirror, Toxic Town and, most famously, the 13th Doctor Who — to be talking sport, that’s because her filmography has recently taken a swift punt into the world of football.
Chatting today, dressed casually in a First Aid Kit band T-shirt, Whittaker is warm and animated as she explains her role in the upcoming Dear England. The thrilling BBC stage-to-TV adaptation of James Graham’s Olivier award-winning theatre show is about the England manager, Gareth Southgate, trying to lead the team to success from 2016. It’s the story of how he utilised psychology to bolster the chances of the lads, while fighting his own demons from missing the penalty that saw England crash out of the Euros in 1996.
The Handmaid’s Tale star Joseph Fiennes — who played Southgate when it first opened at the National Theatre in 2023 — brings his uncanny performance to the screen. Whittaker plays Pippa Grange, who was brought in as Head of People and Team Development at The Football Association in 2017. It was incredibly prescient of Southgate to recruit psychologist Grange to work on the mental health of players like Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham — but she wasn’t accepted by everyone. She faced opposition from some in the FA, and then the media, who painted her appointment as a “woo-woo” role, calling her “the penalty whisperer” in trying to break the English curse.
“These guys are the elite of the elite,” Whittaker says of the players. “And with all the training that they do, the mind is the thing that needs the most care — and is the most battered. I think in 2026 we can talk about mental health and the importance of how young people should be supported. When Gareth brought Pippa in, it was a revolutionary idea. Nowadays, I imagine a psychologist would be a part of most football teams today.”
To build the character of the stoic empath, Whittaker didn’t speak with Grange herself, but instead listened to the audio of her book, Fear Less, which Grange narrated (“Everybody needs to read this book!” Whittaker enthuses). Although Grange was born in Harrogate — not too far from Whittaker’s hometown of Skelmanthorpe — she was brought up in Australia, which accounts for the slight Aussie twang Whittaker has in the series.
As with most of Graham’s work, Dear England is deep-rooted in social realism and comments on wider, state-of-the-nation issues. It questions national identity and also points out that catastrophic events like Covid actually caused wider fractures within society. As Southgate says in the show: “I thought there’d be more a sense of togetherness, maybe, going into this, after what we all went through.”
The series comes at a timely point, when these divisions seem to be getting deeper and more ingrained than ever. But Whittaker believes it’s important the football drama tackles current issues head-on: “I mean, if something’s difficult or not, it doesn’t mean you should avoid approaching it. It’s a part of this story. When players missed penalties, the outrage and the vileness of the response from some people is there, and the racism within football is there. There’s no denying it. But this piece is about so many things. It’s about identity and the idea of masculinity at a time when we’re talking about that masculinity and how we treat vulnerability, and how we deal with fear.”
In the four-part series, we see how the media intrusion affects Grange and, in part, eventually leads her to leave. Have there been any moments in Whittaker’s career where she felt similarly? “I’ve felt incredibly overwhelmed. I’d say the only thing is Doctor Who — the casting of Doctor Who. But has it ever felt too much? No. Because I’m still here, I’m still working.
“It’s an overnight change in your life that you think will permanently be at that high-octane level, and it isn’t. When you get cast, you think it’s gonna be like that scene in Notting Hill every day. Like, I’m gonna be Rhys Ifans every day,” she laughs. “That’s based on naivety and probably narcissism about interest in my own everyday life. But now I can walk down the street and no one bothers me — so I’m living my best life!”
Whittaker famously became the 13th Doctor in 2017, the first woman to take on the iconic role, and it was an incredibly controversial twist. However, she makes a point of not being on social media, so hopefully a lot of those obtuse arguments about “wokeism” passed her by. “But I’d have had to have lived under a rock to not know that my casting was a little bit… questioned,” she says.
Whittaker had a slight return to the Tardis in 2025 and she lights up when talking about it. “It’s genuinely my happiest time on a job — ever. And I’ll never get bored of talking about it, I love it so much.” To the point where it sounds like half the costume and set found its way back home with her. “I’ve taken everything. I’ve got the prison jumpsuit. I’ve got my full costume. I snapped this thing off the Tardis that used to spin when we were in flight. I was a right little shit! I was like a kid in a sweet shop.”
Whittaker — who trained at Guildhall and first started out on stage at the Globe in 2005 — has also put in some incredible performances in hard-hitting series over the years. There’s Orla, a struggling single mum sent to prison for blagging electricity in Jimmy McGovern’s anthology series, Time, in 2023; or in last year’s Toxic Town as Susan McIntyre, a mum in Corby who gives birth to a child with severe disabilities, caused by toxic waste, which is based on a true story. The two roles she says have affected her most are Orla, and Tess in One Night, a similarly emotionally heavy Australian drama. Both roles are as mothers, which perhaps took on extra poignancy for her as she filmed them back-to-back shortly after the birth of her second child in 2022.
“My littlest was five months old and I said: ‘I’m definitely gonna work, but I’m going to do something really convenient and really close by,’” she says. “And then I got sent One Night, which filmed in Sydney, which meant moving us all. Those two jobs felt impactful on me because you explore so many different themes. There was motherhood explored, especially in Time, in a way that, oh, man, you felt like your heart was being ripped out.”
The social impact of Toxic Town was also eye-opening for her. “I ended up chatting to people who were going, ‘I had no idea this happened.’”
Constantly taking on such emotionally raw roles, you’d imagine, might begin to affect her. “But as soon as you say cut,” she says, “my process is absolutely leaving whatever we’ve just done. I always thought, ‘Of course I shake everything off! Of course nothing really lingers’, but when I was playing the Doctor, I would properly bounce around after filming. I was literally like, [puts on a hyper voice] ‘I’m so fun to be around!’
“Then I thought back, ‘Oh, do you know what? Probably playing women who are going through quite a traumatic event, it probably does bleed into an everyday setting.’ If you’re spending four months on the brink of an emotional surge, I suppose maybe my dinnertime personality was affected. I just don’t necessarily notice when that’s happening.”
Coming up next is a small role in the Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein romcom, Office Romance, but beyond this she’s open to whatever comes her way. “I want to do really exciting projects with an amazing script. That could be a £4 film that’s written by someone from Leeds or it could be an epic TV series that’s in its seventh series. To me, just to work is an absolute gift, I never take it for granted. I’m always anxious and always paranoid about never working again. Being on a film set is my absolute comfort.”
She’s also starting to executive produce too, and is currently working on a few fledgling projects that she’s yet unsure how they will pan out. As Pippa Grange would probably advise her: shoot her shot; there’s no doubting that Whittaker’s infectious spirit could just about manifest anything she wants.
Dear England starts on BBC One and iPlayer later this month
