'Doctor Who' exec chats about Peter Capaldi's costume

Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has revealed that the decisions behind the new Doctor’s costume were left to Peter Capaldi.

Moffat told SFX: “He wanted to be quite stark. Stark and skinny. A stick-insect sort of thing. Clara actually calls him a grey-haired stick-insect at one point.”

He joked: “We had some hilarious pictures of Peter just dressing up. I didn’t feel qualified to go and chat too much about it. Certainly the costume didn’t go anywhere until I shut up. The thing I’ve learned about showrunning is you need to know the bits you’re bad at!”

The writer explained: “I’ve got certain things that I’ll say – I don’t want anything in that costume that I have to write into the script. I don’t want people saying ‘But why are you dressed as a circus clown?’ I want him to walk into a pub, a restaurant, a space conference, an army base and nobody stares at him.”

Moffat did have some concerns, however: “There was an issue simply because it’s quite dark as a costume and it’s a show that largely takes place in a tunnel. I kept saying ‘We are going to be able to see him, aren’t we?’”

He also hinted at some of the Doctor’s costume variations in Series 8: “Oddly enough in this series, for whatever reason, he seems to be wearing different outfits far more often than the Doctor normally does. He’s got his basic outfit but he’s in a spacesuit in one of them, and he’s a caretaker in another one and then he’s all dressed up in a later episode.”

He added: “And he mixes up the basic costume, hugely. We’ve tended to see the white shirt version in public but actually the one I like best is when he wears the jumper under his coat. I think he looks like a submarine commander, like an old sailor or something. It makes him all rugged and handsome!”

The main costume was unveiled in January, with Capaldi commenting: “He’s woven the future from the cloth of the past. Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 per cent Rebel Time Lord.”

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