By Osei Akoto – The biggest science fiction TV series known as Doctor Who returned to our screens last Saturday. It is the last season for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor and for the series’ head writer Steven Moffat but it’s not all doom and gloom as the new season welcomes a new companion for the Doctor, Bill Potts. Bill is the first openly gay companion and is played by Pearl Mackie.
The fact that such a major character is both gay and mixed race is very important to Mackie, she often speaks on how she did not see many mixed raced people on television growing up and that it is important for children and young people to be able to identify with characters they watch on television. She tells Sarah Hughes of the Guardian “When I was little there weren’t that many people who looked like me on TV, so it’s great to have two little kids thinking: ‘OK, she looks like me so I’m going to dress up as her, and I don’t need a different kind of face make-up, I don’t need to straighten my hair.’”
Mackie was born on 29th May 1987 and raised in Brixton, south London to a West Indian father and an English mother. She had an interest in acting from a very young age, landing her first acting role as Nancy in a school production of Oliver Twist at 10 years old. Late on in life, Mackie went on to acquire a degree in drama at the University of Bristol before doing a two year foundation course at the Bristol Old Vic. Mackie’s talents don’t stop at acting though she is also a gifted singer and dancer and can also speak both Spanish and French. The first break Mackie made onto the big screen was in 2013 with the music comedy Svengali, along with Martin Freeman and Maxine Peake, as a front house girl. A year later she made an appearance in one episode of Doctors, the BBC medical soap opera, as Anne-Marie Frasier. She also performed in a few theatre productions, the most notable of which was in 2015 when she performed in the National Theatre’s West End production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.
Bill Potts is said to be very different from the most recent companions. Mackie told the BBC in an interview: “Bill is cool – she’s quite young, doesn’t really know much about the world. She’s very real – she’s not had a very easy upbringing and whilst she doesn’t really let that affect her day-to-day life, it’s there under the surface – she can be quite defensive. She’s fun, she’s excited, she’s a bit geeky – she quite likes sci-fi stuff, she’s into space and that type of thing so when she does go on adventures with the Doctor and discovers aliens are real and that kind of stuff it blows her mind which is really cool.”
