Date : 24th febuary 2014

 

Dan Starkey is an actor who has appeared on television since 2009 staring in TV shows such as Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures , Wizards vs. Aliens , The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot and Casualty!​

John - Hello Dan thank you for talking to us today.
 

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John - When you were growing up what were the TV shows that got you hooked watching them?

 

Dan - I watched a lot of television growing up, from dramas to comedy and factual stuff, but the major programme that obsessed me was Doctor Who. Obviously it's quite fortuitous given my future career, but it just captured my imagination completely at a young age. My memories of childhood are synonymous with what was happening in Doctor Who at the time, right up until it was taken off the air when I was twelve in my first year of secondary school. Wider afield, although I watched the usual children's programmes, I probably started watching more mainstream programmes when I was quite young: I remember avidly watching science programmes like Tomorrow's World and a thing called Take Nobody's Word for It which I think had Carol Vorderman in, and being allowed to stay up to watchBlackadder or Spitting Image. When I was a bit older, it was things like Dennis Potter's plays like The Singing Detective and Cold Lazarus, and Alan Bleasdale's GBH that, in an era before box-sets and US-style season-based models, made me take notice of television drama as a medium distinct from, and potentially equal to, film. In particular I remember a series called Our Friends In The North that compressed thirty odd years of social history in about eight hours of television and it felt epic; I watched that in my final year of secondary school, and it felt like the kind of thing that it'd be great to be involved with if I were ever an actor.

 

 

John - When did you first realise that you wanted to work in the world of television?

 

Dan - I wanted to be an actor first and foremost, and I got into that by doing plays at school; not wishing to sound too egotistic it crept up on me that I was quite good at it, but it was some time before I felt confident enough to contemplate it as a career. Acting on screen was always something I wanted to do, but the bread and butter stuff that kept me going was stage work, first at school and university, then professionally after my formal acting training. It's good to have a mixture of work, but given the influence of stuff I watched on the small screen growing up I always hoped that TV work would be a part of it all.

 

 

John - Were you always a fan of scifi?

 

Dan - Well, as I mentioned above, I was obsessed with Doctor Who, and not just on the television screen: we didn't have a video recorder until I was eleven, so of course it wasn't on the television for most of the year. I read and re-read the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories, the comic-strips in Doctor Who Magazine, the annuals and non-fiction books about the series to feed my habit! Although Doctor Who was my "main thing", it did lead to my branching out into the wider world of comics and literary sci-fi when I was a bit older, with the X-Men and 2000AD on one hand, and novels like Michael Moorcock's various fantasy and sci-fi titles that I devoured when I was about 13 or 14. On television, I always watched Star Trek in its various incarnations, and followed most ofBabylon 5, as they were both on when I used to return from school. So yes, along side the perhaps more "social realist" dramas I've described above I've always had a taste for the fantastic too. They repeated The Avengers and The Prisoner when I was a teenager and I got quite into them as well; once you look at the casts of those programmes, there's a lot of cross-fertilisation with the worlds of Doctor Who that's fun to spot.

 

 

John - Who is your favourite Doctor and why?

 

Dan - This is an invidious question, as it changes with my mood! Although the Fourth Doctor is probably my favourite, I'm going to say the Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, as he's the one I remember watching when I was 5 years old and the whole universe of Doctor Who completely sucked me in; watching The Five Doctors for the first time was unbearably exciting.

 

 

John - What was your reaction when you got the part in Doctor who?

 

Dan - It's fair to say, I was quite excited, if you count dancing around and giggling inanely for about an hour as excitement.

 

 

John - What were your thoughts when you first read the script on Doctor who?

 

Dan - I was given an earlier draft of the script to audition with, and it was interesting to see how it differed from the final shooting script. I knew what the Sontarans were like, and did my "homework" by watching my old VHSs of The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment, but it was interesting to note how, some plot points aside, the two characters of Staal and Skorr came to be better defined in the final script as opposed to the earlier draft: Staal is more scheming and strategic, Skorr the straightforward psycho! Reading the stage direction, "He laughs with savage joy whilst blasting down UNIT troops" did make me think of being a kid reading my Target novelisations again, and could scarcely believe that this was something that someone was paying me to do as well!

 

 

John - What did you think about the other members of the cast when you first heard who you will be working with?

 

Dan - I was excited to be working with the regulars David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and Freema who came back for that episode was lovely as well. It was great to work with Chris Ryan too, as I remember being allowed to stay up and watch The Young Ones when I was too young for it in the 1980s as well. He was a great guy to work with, as it was my first TV job and it was good to have someone that you were working with so closely who was so experienced and unaffected in supporting you. The experience of sharing a taxi at stupid o'clock in the morning to be glued into your prosthetics can be a bonding experience too.

 

 

John - Do you remember your first day filming how did it go?

 

Dan - On my first day, I tied Freema to a table and threatened her whilst pushing buttons on my fearsome cloning machine, and telling her that females are all rubbish. So a typical day at the office really.

 

 

John - How long did it take for you to get used to working in full costume and prosthetics?

 

Dan - It does take a while to get used to seeing a different face in the mirror which is very odd when it's glued on for the first few times. After that, it's more the reaction that people have to you when you've been wearing the suit for a few hours, and to some extent, have forgotten you have it on; when you introduce yourself to your new co-workers, you can forget that the cheery smile you're giving them looks like a hideous leer, but you adapt pretty quickly. 

 

 

John - What is your most embarrasing moment on set?

 

Dan - Tearing my trousers whilst striding manfully across the set. It's surprisingly easy to do when your clothes are made out of rubber.

 

 

John - What is your favourite episode and why?

 

Dan - Tricky, as Strax gets so much fun stuff to do. In most of my episodes I get to deliver funny lines, shoot a laser gun and beat up the baddies. But I'll say The Snowmen, as watching myself on BBC1 on Christmas Day was a pretty bloody good feeling.  

 

 

John - Which other Doctor Who character would you choose if you were not a Sontaran?

 

Dan - Although they're all lost somewhere in an alternative dimension, or dead, I'd like to be another renegade Time Lord with his own Tardis. Like the Meddling Monk or someone. Anything where I had my own Tardis basically. A really cool one carved out of quartz crystal or something...  

 

 

John - What projects are you working on and where do we expect to see you next?

 

Dan - I will shortly be filming on the new series of Wizards vs. Aliens which I imagine will be on later this year.

 

 

John - Thank you again Dan it means alot to us.

 

Dan - No problem.