Eccleston on Why He Declined 50th Anniversary Return
Eccleston told audiences at the Rose City Comic Con panel [Via Radio Times]:“When [The Day of the Doctor] came along I did speak to them.
“I didn’t feel that what they were asking me to do did justice to the Ninth Doctor. So I said no.”
Eccleston also still had issue with how he’d been treated during the 2005 run, something he went into detail about previously.
“They approached me to be in [‘The Day of the Doctor’], but the BBC had still not apologised to me,” he said.
“I liked Steven Moffat a lot. I considered it. But it had an enormous emotional impact on me, what happened with Doctor Who.
“As the series was going out, as the series was being celebrated I was being vilified in the press in the UK because of the statement that the BBC issued.
“And it caused quite a depression in me that year. While everybody was going ‘Doctor Who’s great – he’s great and he’s gone’. Because they [the BBC] kind of smeared me and told lies about me.”
However, Eccleston thinks him turning down the role ended up being a good thing in the end: “The virtue of that is that we then get the War Doctor. Because if I’d have come back you wouldn’t have got the War Doctor – the War Doctor was there precisely because the Ninth Doctor wasn’t.”
“And John Hurt’s a far better actor than me, and that opened up a whole new dimension. So it was a positive thing really.”
