"Doctor!" "Come on, I've found us a spaceship." "It's into deep space and deep trouble, as the Doctor makes a splash in his latest adventure." "And right in the thick of it is his new companion, Amy Pond." "Karen brings so much of herself to the role as Amy, all that sort of mad, kooky energy that she has in her life." "I'm really very fond of her, actually, have to say." "Battling sinister Smilers and solving the mystery ofthe Starship UK, she proves she's no ordinary girl." "Just stop." "Whatever you're doing, stop it now!" "Karen just knocked it out of the park." "She's brilliant." "Wait, no!" "No!" "So join Doctor Who Confidential as we follow actress Karen Gillan to find out what it's really like to take on this challenging role." "Doctor?" "Doctor Who alwaysprovides its cast and crew with a universe of challenges." "And for new companion Amy Pond, it's an episode packed full of firsts." "Welcome to London Market." "You are being monitored." "Episode 2 is our first journey into outer space and it's Amy's first time away from her own world." "351, take 7, B camera unit." "And action!" "Well, close the door." "I'm in the future." "Like hundreds of years in the future." "When I first walked on the set, I was in a bit of, like, wonder and awe." "It was like, "Wow, this is amazing." "It's huge and it's really cool. "" "So I just kind of channelled a bit of that into how I played" "Amy's first reaction when she walks onto the set." "It's the whole of Britain, but it's been bolted together and it's floating in the sky." "Police state, do you see it yet?" "Where?" "There." "The Doctor sort of discovers more and more about this very strange place that he's in." "So, is this how it works, Doctor?" "You never interfere in the affairs of other peoples or planets, unless there's children crying?" "Yes." "And roll, please!" "The first priority was to find a location that, obviously, that worked asthe Starship UK." "And that's a challenge in itself." "But fortunately, Steven's description of that particular set was so specific that we were able to find that quite early." "The canvas we had for that, in terms of the space, was already very good." "But it needed to come alive, you know, with design and art direction and lighting." "That is always a challenge." "And more than ready for the challenge are thedoctor Who art department team." "But it's no easy task converting a disused factory into theStarship UK." "So today we're in Mamhilad, which is a location that we use quite a lot in Doctor Who." "It's our sort of failsafe industrial space." "We've got our scenic artists here, who are doing all the painting that you can see on the walls." "And we've got our set decorators here, who are basically putting in all the decorations, hanging the bunting, dressing the market stalls." "We've got our practical electricians here, who are wiring up all the practical lighting, streetlights." "You realise what's very iconically British." "I think they've really got that." "It just felt like you really were in it because there's so much going on around you." "It was great." "But Amy wasn't expecting the Starship UK to be quite as mad as this." "Say what?" "Say, "Whee!"" "Swallow reflex!" "...receptors." "We were on the tongue of a giant whale." "It was really fun." "We were just messing around the whole time, throwing cabbage at each other and things." "Keep doing that on this strip, particularly this joint here, Chris." "Danny, keep thickening it up, yeah?" " I will, yeah." " Thank you, Kristin." "That set was..." "It was quite, um, demanding for the artists." "You know, they had to slide down the tubes and land six foot below on a very slippery surface." "But we made sure that we had our stunt coordinator." " How are you, Amy?" " Oh, I'm scared." "So really, on the drop, six-foot drop, honestly, by the time you're thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm at the end... "" " So the drop's all right?" " Yeah." " Ooh, this is fun." " How are you?" "I mean, we both looked at each other, as we do on a lot of occasions with this job and go," ""This is our job." "This is what we do, right?"" "219, take 1, A camera, mark." " There's Matt up." " Okay." "All right, here we go, everybody." "Three..." "You'd get on the ride and then you'd hang on the back and go "whoom-pa!" into all the goo." "Whoo!" "Let me know when Karen's set." "Okay, that's Karen set." "And three, two, one, Karen!" " Three, two, one, action!" "They said, "Action!" and I was like, "I can't let go, I can't let go." ""Oh, God!" "Oh, God!" And I just did it." "Karen." "Portraying Amy Pond falls to actress Karen Gillan, who works hard to bring new qualities to the role of the companion." "Karen, I believe, has really brought a lot to this role." "I think she's brilliant." "She's fantastic and it doesn't seem to matter what we throw at her, she lights up the screen whether we ask her to be covered in star whale vomit or try and save the world wearing only her nightie," "she's equally fantastic." "I'm going to be about to do a bit of a scary fall, and I've got a board up my back." " You do?" " So it should be fun." "God, I think Karen brings so much of herself to the role as Amy, all that sort of mad, kooky energy that she has in her life." "Just Karenness, Karen madness, and that feisty Scottish Inverness "Don't mess with me. "" "There's all that in there as well." "We've become closer every day." "I'm really very fond of her, actually, have to say." "Karen can kind of do everything." "I think the thing that we probably enjoy most about her is how funny she can be." "She's a natural, natural comic, while obviously looking completely stunning all the time." "There was almost as much speculation about who we were going to cast as the companion as there had been about the Doctor." "As ever, we were just led by our nose and by who..." "When Andy Pryor, Doctor Who's brilliant casting director, showed us tapes, we were just led by the person who kind of nailed the part, basically." "It's difficult because there's no one thing that qualifies anybody for the part." "It's more about, you know, somebody doing something surprising with it and the people that we saw were all able to do that, but Karen clearly was way ahead of the pack in terms of her inventiveness." "Steven Moffat was there and the execs and Matt and the casting director, so it was quite daunting walking in." "We'd seen about seven or eight people, and then Karen walked in and we all went, "Yes!" "Got her!"" "And we alljust flustered around the room after, I think," ""Well, that's easy." "That's it." "That's her." "It's going to be her. "" "I actually found out that day, which was very nice, yeah." "That evening I got the call saying, "You got it!"" "And I started screaming like an idiot." "But it was really nice because it wasn't an agonising wait." "Head up a little bit." "It's so lovely sort of having this process to share with her and doing it together, both being new, because it's such a mad thing, Doctor Who." "It's such a tricky and brilliant show to make." "It's lovely to share that journey with someone." "It's just, you know, we went through all these milestones together, the first read-through, we did that together and then we did our first day on set and then we got our first block finished and, you know, we have all these really huge things in life that we're sharing." "You know, it makes you quite close." "Yeah, she's a funny soul." "Today we are in a lovely old abbey, and we are filming the kind of climax scene of Episode 2, where we discover that the star whale is actually trapped in the torture dungeon of Starship UK." "What's that?" "It's the gas pedal, the accelerator, Starship UK's "go faster" button." "Because they think that it will help the starship go faster and things if they trap it and torture it." "So it's a really sad scene, but also it's quite a heroic scene for Amy." "Three options." "One, I let the star whale continue in unendurable agony for hundreds more years." "Two, I kill everyone on this ship." "Three, I murder a beautiful, innocent creature as painlessly as I can." "And then I find a new name, because I won't be the Doctor any more." "There must be something we can do, some other way." "Nobody talk to me." "Nobody human has anything to say to me today!" "The Doctor nearly makes a dreadful mistake." "He nearly kills the star whale because he can't see any other way out of it." "It's the only thing he can think of doing." "For him to be saved from doing that is immense for him, because he would remember that forever." "He'd never forget that scale of failure." "And for Amy to save him from that by understanding him and the star whale better, it's the biggest gift she could give him." "He realises she made the right decision." "It's probably the first time in those first two episodes where he begins to look up to her as much as she looks up to him." "I think it's quite a tough one for the Doctor because he's almost just done what he would never ever normally do, which is to effectively kill something, and I think that's a very scary place for him to have been taken to." "What it proves is that Amy is a very worthy companion for him." "She actually bizarrely knows him really well, certainly knows this version of the Doctor better than this version of the Doctor knows himself." "You could have killed everyone on this ship." "You could have killed a star whale." "And you saved it." "I know, I know." "This episode was always the one about Amy kind of earning her spurs, and I think the Doctor realises that she's going to be more than just a girl Friday." "Amazing, though, don't you think?" "A star whale." "All that pain and misery and loneliness." "I think that's when she really seals the kind of... her place in the Tardis for good." "And it just made it kind." "But you couldn't have known how it would react." "You couldn't." "I've seen it before." "Very old and very kind and the very, very last." "Sound a bit familiar?" "I think it inspires him with humility and, you know, makes him feel, you know, very humble and very..." "He respects her." "And he's grateful, you know, actually deeply very grateful to her for saving him, in a way." "Hey." "What?" "Gotcha."