Doctor Who actor wants 'emotion'
Christopher Eccleston will become the ninth Doctor Who
Actor Christopher Eccleston, who has been chosen to play the new Doctor Who, has said he wants the Time Lord to show more "feelings and emotions".
Eccleston, 40, told Doctor Who Magazine he wanted the show to move away from "spooky escapism".
The actor said he wanted to give the role "weight and ambiguity".
The new series of the veteran sci-fi show will be screened next year, and is being written by Queer as Folk writer Russell T Davies.
Doctor Who, originally played by William Hartnell, began in 1963. Seven actors played the doctor before the show was axed in 1989.
Eccleston, who made his name is shows such as Cracker and Our Friends in the North, said he had been influenced by the doctor's second incarnation, played by Patrick Troughton.
'Melancholy'
He said he had found Troughton's performance "compelling and a little bit frightening".
He said he wanted to move the role away from his "foppish image and find a more modern hero". The actor said he wanted to concentrate more on the part's "melancholy side".
The actor said the Daleks were "vulnerable" villains
The actor also told the magazine that he had been offered the role of the doctor for a movie eight years ago but had turned it down because he thought it might typecast him.
Paul McGann, one of the stars of the cult film Withnail and I, played the eighth incarnation for the 1996 film.
He told the magazine one of his most important memories of the show as a child was when viewers saw what was inside the casing of the doctor's arch-enemies, the Daleks.
"This great, cold steel instrument of destruction, all that casing, all that armour, is actually to protect this very vulnerable, strange, frightened creature," he said.
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