Doctor Who's Tosin Cole: 'Seeing people who look like me on stage made me think I could do that'

Granted, every new Doctor Who companion since time (and space) began finds themselves “confused” at first in the Tardis. But Tosin Cole’s first rehearsal-room mix-up was more down to earth than the usual wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.

“I remember thinking Bradley Walsh was The Doctor,” says Cole, 26, with a laugh. Walsh — the former Coronation Street actor and host of ITV’s The Chase — instead joins Cole and Mandip Gill in the cast as one of three new side-kicks, alongside Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor. “I was confused. I’d never watched any episodes, I didn’t know what a Time Lord was. I wasn’t in that world — I don’t even watch TV,” says Cole. “I remember turning up to read my lines and seeing Jodie and thinking, ‘Oh, who’s this? It’s Jodie Whittaker. Maybe she’s just here to help out’.”

Not that Cole has any problem with the Doctor being played by a woman for the first time. Nor can he understand the fuss her casting created among a small but vocal pocket of fans.

“It’s an alien at the end of the day, right? If you can believe an alien can regenerate and time-travel in space, and dies but never dies, why can’t she be a lady?”

We’re at the Lyric Hammersmith on Cole’s lunch break during rehearsals for the new Royal Court play ear for eye, for debbie tucker green (she spells her name and titles in lower case). This is the second time Cole has worked with green — at 20, he was cast in second coming, written directed by green, but was cut out of the final edit. “So it’s been nice to get a full dose,” says Cole.

He says we can expect a mature performance. “Obviously she saw my little scrap of a beard, and she was like, ‘OK, cool, I’m not going to let you play kids, you’re kind of getting on and coming up in the world.’ When she last saw me I had about four hairs there.”

Green is typically secretive about her work — and Cole has had to get used to keeping secrets. “When the call came through for Doctor Who, they said, ‘You’re up for this thing that can’t be named’ ... but it’s Doctor Who, but it CAN’T be named’.” Did he tell anyone? “I wasn’t supposed to. But I told my family and my friends straight away.”

Why the stage secrecy? Simple. “Debbie does this because she wants the theatre to be an experience,” he says. “When people know what it’s about, or have preconceptions, they might programme their minds to start thinking the play’s going to be about one issue or another way. The experience is in being there, piecing it together.” Because, although we know the work is “a new play about protest and the black body in the UK and US today”, Cole wants nothing to distract from the story. “It’s about telling stories that people connect with, and which they see themselves in.”

In Doctor Who, his character, Ryan Sinclair, is dyspraxic. “Which is something we never see, and which people rarely talk about,” says Cole. “People are like, ‘What’s this? What does that mean?’. It means the motor skills don’t really work, they might be on balance, off balance, and it’s a longer process to train the body to cope with physical activity. Yet Ryan’s out there saving the universe.”

Cole himself “fell into acting” at 16, attending after-school theatre youth groups at Intermission Youth Theatre groups. He had “hated” Shakespeare at school, Abbey Wood secondary in Greenwich, but artistic director Darren Raymond made the playwright “relatable”.

“They took me to see Sucker Punch [Roy Williams’s 2010 play for the Royal Court starring Anthony Welsh and Daniel Kaluuya], and that was one of the best theatre experiences I’ve ever had because I saw people who look like me, who sound like me, telling a story about London. It’s through these things that they show us theatre that connects with us.

“That’s one of the first plays I ever saw and thought — that’s sick. That would be sick if I could do that. And I tell Dan and Anthony that all the time. I’m proper fanboys of theirs. They inspired me to take that one step further. Now it’s proper crazy, because we’re peers, and we can have a proper conversation.”

Cole was scouted by an agent, and never finished his A-levels. Instead, there was a paid gig on E20, EastEnders’ youth-focused spin-off. “I remember thinking I’m going to be rich — I’m a millionaire! I’m so used to watching TV docs where people say they’re on 10 million. It was a couple of thousand, if that. I bought some Nike trainers, as you do when you’re 17 years old.”

Cole says acting was partly a means of expressing himself. “I come from a place where no one expresses themselves. I have to present myself a certain way. Even to this day I’m very closed-in. I can’t just open up and give someone my whole life story.”

He moved from New York to London aged eight with his father and uncle after his parents separated. “But again, I don’t like to talk about it,” he says. What he will say is that he sees pathways to work, like his own, getting fewer. “I went to a lot of their youth clubs. But when the Government started shutting them down — the things you find fun, the things that make you grow as a person — when they start to go, what do you do? You’re lost. No one’s helping you after 3.30pm. You get into all sorts of mischief”.

What’s his manifesto? “I want better politicians — maybe younger ones. Politicians from all walks of life, that understand youth from all walks of life. People who come from a well-off background, with no type of struggle, they don’t know the inner-city struggles. They can’t relate to that.

“We need people who relate to that, or understand it, or have seen it, or been through it.”

Saving London won’t happen overnight. For now, Tosin Cole is taking on the universe.

ear for eye is at the Royal Court, SW1 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com), Oct 25-Nov 24