With Series 5 just around the corner, this week various news sites have been publishing snippets of Matt Smith’s new interview which will appear in the upcoming edition of Esquire magazine.

In the issue, the Eleventh Doctor actor describes how he was forced to bury his original ambition to become a professional football player when a sudden back injury led him down the path of peforming arts instead. 

“It was very tough,” The Sun quotes. ”I remember crying, because that was all I’d ever invested in.”

Meanwhile, The Daily Mail have posted an extract in which he reveals that, ironically, friends have been likening him to the Doctor for years, all thanks to his Tom Baker-esque scarf that he wore at university. “I had a big coloured scarf and people often said, ‘All right, Doctor Who?’” he revealed. “I thought, I rather liked the notion!”

He goes on to admit that he wasn’t phased by the challenges he faced when he accepted the role. “I give everything I have to this show,” he explained. “I go in, do 14 hours on set, then come home and learn lines. I’m saying reams of mad dialogue, and you can’t blag that, you have to know it inside out.” 

And, according to him, our beloved Time Lord is a ‘busy’ character, someone who ‘finds humans fascinating’, and someone who’d be ‘in real trouble’ if he stopped saving the world! “Imagine if you’d travelled round for 900-plus years on your own with this great weight behind you?” he said. ”He’s an addict!”

You can read his full interview in the latest issue of Esquire, out Thursday 4th March. The fifth series of Doctor Who will launch with The Eleventh Hour next month. Stay tuned!

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