#also how single children w indulgent parents act

[padfootastic]

Hey I wanted some insight on how to write James with more depth. I saw on a one of your post you mentioned not liking that he matured for a girl, and I can agree. And I saw you mentioning his elderly parents and how they died around the war. How do you think being raised by older parents affected his character overall?

oh hey anon 💜💜 i’m not sure i’m the best person for advice on how to write a character w depth (since it’s something i routine eschew in favor of self indulgence) but i can certainly try!

so, i’m not sure if effie and flea dying from illness (dragonpox?) is canon or not but i certainly treat it so. i think they passed away around his 7th year, maybe midway through, and that just strengthened his resolve to join the order. plus, it gives me a more plausible reason for why him and lily married so young.

regarding how growing up with elderly parents might’ve affected him, here’s a few possible options:

- kind, kind, kind. he’s sincere and polite and has impeccable manners (does he sometimes give up on them if the situation calls for? sure) because it’s been instilled in him from birth. i think family portraits going back generations also played a huge role here.

- he’s great with small talk and endearing himself to old people. he’s used to his parents’ friends and often, he prefers being with them over his peers because he can understand them and their motivations better. i think while he was an extrovert and definitely loved hanging out with people, his social skills were a bit rusty bc he’s not grown up around a lot of kids so he doesn’t rly know how to relate to them. (enter: my hc that james uses old people swears like good heavens and goodness gracious) he had to stumble around to get better with his batchmates in hogwarts and even then, he sometimes slips up and goes into geriatric mode and gets teased a lot for it.

- i also think he’d be big on like, tradition and superstition? even when he stops actually believing in them, he still does it bc of habit or ‘what’s the harm?’ or he wants to keep some part of his parents alive. he’s probably thought up all kinds of things he wants to do with harry and teach him and habits to instil in him which just makes it that much more tragic that he didn’t get to

- his nurturing nature came from an acute awareness of his parents’ mortality and taking care of them from a young age. i see flea and effie as realists, treating james as an equal for all that they coddle him. so they’ve never hid this part from him and he’s always had a low grade fear? anxiety? about when time will run out so he tries to over compensate for it by doing the most. (sometimes i hc a james with control issues but that’s a tangent)

- on the flip side, his arrogance definitely came from being a miracle baby. he had all the silver/gold/platinum spoons in his mouth and so much privilege he doesn’t know what to do with it. while his heart is in the right place, effie & flea were cut from the same cloth so his understanding of these nuances came much, much later as he started interacting with people in hogwarts who had very different lives. i think this made him a bit insensitive at times, but definitely the aforementioned heart makes sure he makes amends, even if they’re fumbling and based on trial-and-error.

- he was a lonely kid!! as much as he loved his parents and their friends and his life, he still grew up mainly alone in a large manor with nothing but portraits to talk to and that had to have had an effect on him. combine that w his never ending energy and always being switched on and is it any wonder he keeps doing The Absolute Most when he finally gets to hogwarts? how hard he latches on to sirius?

- oh also, i think he definitely has some form of rejection sensitivity. i’ve mentioned this before but i think, despite his confidence, it can be easy to make him self conscious by bringing up say, how loudly he talks or how he ‘never shuts up’ or ‘oh my god ur so annoying potter do u ever just, chill out’ (one reason why a lot of jily fics don’t agree w me tbh), partly because he’s never really been criticised before so he doesn’t know how to constructively deal with it and partly bc he’s always thinking in extremes and doesn’t want to be a bother so he decides completely shutting himself off is the only acceptable solution. (another hc: sirius knows this, understands it as an actual problem, and is therefore the only one who can bring up his faults/tell him to cut it out without sending him into a guilt/hurt spiral)

i’m...gonna stop here. i don’t know if all of these make sense but it’s how i see james (i think) so i rly hope it helps u! if u end up writing a fic/post (even if it doesn’t have any of this lol), tag me so i can read it <333 happy writing, anon!

[stevishabitat]

“These are the perils of working from home,” mutters David Tennant, typing into his phone, filmed by his computer and watched, bemusedly, by me.

The 49-year-old actor has been texting, intermittently and apologetically, throughout our Zoom call. One of his five children (aged 18, nine, seven, four and eight months) has returned to school, and it seems pickup arrangements have been miscommunicated.

Tennant’s correspondent – I assume it is his wife, Georgia – is messaging from inside the house; Tennant is in the garden, his long lockdown locks pushed back into a Beckham-style headband. Over yonder, he gestures off-camera, a homeschooling lesson is under way: “I came outside to avoid the maths.”

Yet Tennant seems to have embraced the realities of home life, with two BBC projects drawing on his experience of raising a family. In the meta, of-the-moment series Staged, he and Georgia play versions of themselves in lockdown in their Chiswick home, while There She Goes (which returns for a second series tomorrow) captures an oft-unspoken truth about parenting, says Tennant: that “it’s sort of a slog”.

Coupled with doing interviews from his garden – Tennant tips his camera to show me Myrtle the cockapoo, flopped at his feet – it offers a surprising glimpse into the family life of an actor who has previously been reluctant to reveal any of it.

“We’re not quite as squeamish as we were,” he agrees, not least because his eldest son, Ty, is now also an actor. “I don’t think we’ll ever be sharing pictures of our children in Hello! magazine, but I think a lot of that comes from an insecurity about being uncovered or invaded. The longer you’re together, the less that feels like a threat.”

Tennant met Georgia (then Moffett) in 2008 on the set of Doctor Who – her father is a former Doctor, Pete Davison. “As our relationship was born out of people trying to stick lenses through windows, it’s taken us a long time to slough off that residual nervousness about sharing anything.”

These days, their guard is low enough for Georgia to post on Instagram a shot of herself breastfeeding – and to rail against Mark Zuckerberg when the image was removed by Facebook for breaching community standards (“I’ll come round there and squirt you in the eye”).

But, Tennant adds: “It’s still important to us that the characters in Staged are not us,” “David” being “more pathetic” than Tennant and “Georgia” more indulgent of him. “We’re not telling the actual story of our private life.”

There She Goes, however, he praises as scrupulously honest. The comedy stars Tennant and Jessica Hynes as parents of a child with a severe learning disability, based on the experience of the writers Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford with their daughter, who was born with an extremely rare (and still undiagnosed) chromosomal disorder.

Tennant plays Simon, the character Pye based on himself: a loving but somewhat hapless father, always out to foist young Rosie on to his wife so he can head down the pub. Tennant says he tried to catch Pye out on set: “I’d go: ‘This bit we’re doing today – that didn’t really happen, did it?’ And everything is true.”

The first series was widely praised for refusing to sugarcoat the realities of parenting and marriage, while still finding moments of sweetness. Hynes won a Bafta for her turn as Emily, Rosie’s harried but devoted mum who, in a low moment, admits to struggling to love her newborn.

Simon, meanwhile, leans on booze and dark humour. There She Goes can be an undeniably uncomfortable watch. But the dual narratives of each episode – switching between a challenging but joyful time for the family and a more desperate early one – provide relief and perspective.

Tennant considers the series a mainstream comedy. Yet there had been trepidation within the BBC about how it would be received, he says, “because it lacked a certain sentimentality and political correctness – there was a real fear”. He disdainfully recalls a journalist at the press launch playing devil’s advocate, warning of a coming “shitstorm”: “He said: ‘You are going to be destroyed for putting this on television.’ We all hoped he was wrong – but we feared that he might be right.” And this was after the huge critical success of the police drama Broadchurch, which might easily have convinced Tennant he could do no wrong.

The casting of a non-disabled actor as nine-year-old Rosie – who is non-verbal, with the mental age of a toddler – was one sensitivity, says Tennant. The possibility of casting an actor with a learning disability had been explored, he says, “because, of course, that’s a live issue and one that has to be rightly unpicked”. But the demands of the role were found to be too great for a young actor with a disability. “Anyone who appreciates the kind of challenges that a child like Rosie would have doesn’t doubt that it would not really have been possible.”

Miley Locke, who is now 11, was “an incredible find”, says Tennant, praising her as nimble and uninhibited in a challenging role. Locke has met Jo, on whom Rosie is based, and has “an incredible capacity to find the truth of that character”, he says. “She’s also very game – I’m endlessly having to pick her up and fling her about and yank her around …”

Any parent will identify with “that constant sense that you’re falling short”, he says – now, perhaps, more than ever. A scene in which Emily tries desperately to work in the face of Rosie’s demands has taken on new relevance during lockdown. “Well, quite,” says Tennant, while texting in response to the latest news from Georgia. “Erm. Sorry …”

A big part of the challenge of shooting Staged was finding moments when the children were “either asleep or quiet”, but Tennant counts himself as “phenomenally fortunate” to have had the work, given how acting has been affected by the pandemic. This October, he was due to appear in CP Taylor’s play Good; that now seems unlikely.

Even when theatres are able to reopen, Tennant does not foresee audiences flocking back, “to sit there watching three hours of Chekhov as someone coughs all over them”. The impact on British culture could be catastrophic, he fears, even for institutions such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It’s a huge bill just to keep those buildings running … We could be left with a cultural scene that’s vastly changed, and that’s a huge part of who we are as a nation.

“Even if the theatre is of no interest to you, even if it feels like an elitist playground, it’s places like that that all the other creative industries feed off,” he says, adding that the arts make a significant contribution to the UK economy – nearly £11bn in 2016, more than agriculture.

Tennant’s career first developed in theatre. As a teenager in Paisley, the son of a Presbyterian minister, he became one of the youngest students at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Even as his work in television and film has taken off, Tennant continues to be a regular on stage, especially with the RSC.

It faces a “titanic problem” in the pandemic, he says, having furloughed 90% of its staff. Government intervention is needed to support theatres until they can reopen, he says, but he is sceptical of it materialising. “If one felt more inclined to trust this government, one might relax, but they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory thus far.” In fact, since I spoke to Tennant, the government has promised the arts and heritage sectors a rescue package worth £1.57bn, which the playwright and funding advocate James Graham described as “surprisingly ambitious”.

A longtime Labour supporter, Tennant appeared in an election broadcast in 2015 before becoming disillusioned with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership (to summarise various diplomatic responses to interviewers). Asked if he was a fan of Corbyn in 2017, he said he was a fan of the party – although its ambivalent position on Brexit (which Tennant has called a “shitshow”) was a sticking point.

Before last year’s general election, he said he was not even sure if he would vote for Labour. He did – to return Ruth Cadbury to her Brentford and Isleworth seat: “And, also, what was the actual alternative?”

He admits he found Labour’s defeat and the postmortem “disappointingly predictable”, although he still struggles to fathom how so many red seats turned blue. “How do you go from ever being a Labour supporter to supporting Boris Johnson?” he asks, dumbfounded.

He expresses some limited sympathy for politicians handed a pandemic when they thought they “were only going to have to talk about Brexit”. “But if you choose a cabinet purely to surround yourself with people who won’t disagree with you, you’re not necessarily getting the greatest brains in the country,” he says, although a caveat is quick in coming. “One might postulate, were that to be the case, and I’m not for a minute suggesting it is …”

Last year, Tennant singled out Michael Gove’s call for “enough of experts” as a “political lowpoint”. That attitude has had deadly consequences during the pandemic, I suggest. Now the government is “hiding behind them”, he agrees – “selectively, of course. If the experts then say: ‘We told them not to do that,’ suddenly they’re evil again.”

He shakes his head in despair. “Ugh! It’s a very sad state of affairs. Remember when there used to be clever people? When you look back on David Cameron and George W Bush with some kind of sentimentality, you think: ‘Jesus – how low have we plummeted, when they look like better options than what we’ve got currently?’”

Under Keir Starmer, Tennant says Labour “are looking a lot stronger”: “We’ve got a clever grownup in the room, which makes the other side look as ridiculous as they are. Let’s hope he can fulfil his early promise.”

Tennant has said he was inspired to act by watching Doctor Who at the age of three. When he was cast as the 10th incarnation of the Doctor, in 2005, he quipped that the first line of his obituary was written. Ten years since ceding the role to Matt Smith, Tennant remains as connected as ever to the programme, recording a new Doctor Who audio drama while in lockdown. “It’s a nice show to be associated with, because people feel kindly towards it,” he says. “You may not be a fan, but it sort of sits there in the cultural firmament. As a nation, I think we’re quite proud of it.”

Unlike many vehicles for British nostalgia, the malleability of the format has allowed Doctor Who to move with the times, he thinks. “It absolutely comes with all that nostalgic goodwill, but it also manages to live in the moment.

“It felt like a very different show in 2005 than it did in 1963, but it also has that link to the past – which is a positive, rather than preserving it in aspic in any way.” And the Doctor, defined by his (or her) kindness, a peaceful champion of the underdog, is “a wonderful character to aspire to. It’s about being the cleverest person in the room, not the strongest.”

Tennant, meanwhile, remains in his garden, the school pickup plan no more clear for all the messages sent back and forth over the threshold. “Probably would have been quicker just to go and have a conversation,” he says, cheerily. “But less fun for you, obviously.”