After swapping the Coronation Street cobbles for Doctor Who’s Tardis, Millie Gibson’s career is about to go stratospheric. Ahead of her first outing in the Doctor Who Christmas special, she chats to Josh Smith for his GLAMOUR column, Josh Smith Meets, about bringing the Time Lord and his companion into our times.
How do you picture getting the call that you’ve landed your dream job? Well, when Millie Gibson found out she landed the role of Ruby Sunday, the new companion to the fifteenth Doctor Who, played by Sex Education star Ncuti Gatwa – she was in a sticky situation to say the least.
“I had just got a spray tan,” Millie laughs, telling me from her home via Zoom: “So I was just in the waiting room, waiting for it to dry, standing there and then my phone just kept buzzing. And I was like, ‘What is going on with that phone?’ It was a group call, and when you get a group call from all three of your agents, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve either been cancelled or I’ve got a good part.’ So I picked it up. And they were like, ‘Can you keep a secret? You got the part!’ But it was so top secret, I couldn’t tell anyone. I was too scared to tell my mum, but obviously I did!”
And just like that, with the unmistakable scent of biscuit/fake tan wafting around her, Millie’s life changed. Did she manage to keep it a secret for long? “I got backed into a corner a little bit with fear. They were literally just like, ‘If you tell anyone, it could jeopardise this part.’ No secret is worth that,” she shares. “When I got announced on Children In Need, I had so many of my friends and family messaging me, being like, ‘What the hell? Why didn’t you tell us that you got this part?’ It’s so funny because I’m too scared to even take pictures on set sometimes, because you just don’t know what’s going to happen if I accidentally put it on my [Instagram] Story or something when I’m drunk.” Millie truly gets more iconic by the second when you speak to her, so it’s easy to see why she landed the role.
Before she finds a whole new fandom when she makes her Doctor Who debut in the Christmas Day special, the 19 year-old is currently best-known for her four-year stint playing Kelly on the nation’s longest running soap, Coronation Street. But where was Millie at in life when Doctor Who came calling? “It was on my very, very last day on Coronation Street. My agent rang me up and he was like, ‘Hi, how are you feeling?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m a little bit put out today. It’s my last day. I’m going to miss everyone… and wondering if I made the right decision or not.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, this will cheer up!’”