Georgia Tennant reveals why it “took a while” for her to reprise Doctor Who’s Jenny

By Morgan Jeffery

Published: Tuesday, 09 November 2021 at 12:00 am

Georgia Tennant first played Jenny on Doctor Who back in 2008 – 10 years later, she reprised the role for a new series of adventures from audio drama producers Big Finish… and now, after another three-year gap, she’s back again as the Doctor’s daughter.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com ahead of the release of Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter series 2: Still Running – out this month – Tennant revealed why it took a decade for her to return the role of Jenny, and what held up this new sequel series.

“It took a while for me to want to give that character further life,” she revealed. “I think mainly because I felt like it was kind of a perfectly formed character… she disappeared off into the universe and that felt like a lovely full stop – with a little question mark after it. And that was nice. So I felt like if I brought her back, I wanted it to be the right thing to have done. I didn’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, here she is again!’ – so it took me a long time and it was quite a creative process with Big Finish to figure out how that would work. So it took a couple of years actually.”

With the first series of audio adventures – released in June 2018 – earning a warm reception from Doctor Who fandom, Tennant explained that “a series of unfortunate incidents” were to blame for the new follow-up being put on hold till 2021.

She laughed: “I don’t mean to call my latest child an ‘unfortunate incident’ – but I had another baby and I was unable to walk for my final pregnancy, so I couldn’t go anywhere and I couldn’t work at that particular point. And then we sort of started back up again, and then entered the pandemic. So my daughter and the pandemic are the reason why everyone’s been waiting. But thank you for your patience – I will punish her in the future for keeping you all waiting for season two!”

Big Finish

The new adventures will see a more evolved Jenny, Tennant hinted, with a different “driving force” as she encounters foes new and old, including classic Doctor Who monsters the Cybermen.

“I do think that her character has developed – we’re on our fourth day of recording and she’s definitely got a more defined character. But the character in the TV series, obviously, had just been born, so there was very little in terms of personality, she was somewhat like a baby, waiting to be imprinted on by the world and the universe and I feel like that has now happened.

“But also the root of the series is less her looking for her father. I would say the first season, it felt like she was lost, and trying to find him was a way of trying to find herself – but I would say now that it’s less about that, and it’s more about her trying to find ways to get her kicks. And if she were to find him along that journey it would be lovely, but that’s definitely not the driving force anymore.”