The Time Lords’ mother, lover… or even wife? Alex Kingston‘s River Song refuses to be pinned down – much like the actress herself.
This article originally appeared in Radio Times for the week 1-7 May 2010.
“I thought I’d died, but I didn’t. Well, I did, but I haven’t yet,”Alex Kingston explains – or rather doesn’t. “God, it’s complicated!” Having last appeared as the beguiling River Song in Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead in 2008 – in which the time-travelling archaeologist perished saving David Tennant’s Doctor – Kingston reprises her role alongside Matt Smith’s time traveller in a battle against the Weeping Angels this week, last seen in Blink in 2007.
In this current two-parter (The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone), River is decidedly not dead. She’s a younger version of the one who previously met, and admitted to having intimate knowledge of, the Doctor. Time travel can be confusing, but it does give the Surrey-born actress something of a unique perspective on the whole Doctor Who phenomenon, having played opposite both Tennant and Smith.
More of that later. First, Kingston. She has always been one for unusual roles. Since she left the UK in 1996, after the breakdown of her marriage to Ralph Fiennes, she played ER‘s formidable Dr Elizabeth Corday for eight seasons. Back in the UK, she was a surprisingly nuanced Mrs Bennet in ITV1′s excellent Lost in Austen in 2008 and, last year, a gangster’s moll on the run in the Highlands in BBC1′s Hope Springs. In 2006, she graced the London stage as Nurse Ratched in a revival of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A wide variety of characters by any measure. If they share any traits, those are indefatigability, defiance and strength.
“I like playing those sorts of characters, because I feel I am that sort of person,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t need validation or assurance – a lot of actors do – but I feel as if I’m a grown-up now. I’m tall, strong, and I’ve never played ingénue roles, so I don’t have a fear of that all evaporating. I’m a character actress, and incredibly proud of that.”
Kingston recalls speaking to a friend after landing Lost in Austen. “He asked if I was playing the girl, so when I told him I was playing Mrs Bennet, he laughed and said, ‘Oh my God, Alex. We’ve transitioned. We’re no longer the young ones!’ And it’s true. I still feel as if I’m young, because you age with your peer group and feel as if you’re part of the ‘it crowd’. But you’re not. I realised then I’d made that step. It’s liberating.”
Liberation certainly suits Kingston. Wearing a coronet of golden curls, she’s positively luminous – and if ever there were a role that fitted into Kingston’s pantheon of Amazons, it’s River Song. Hop back in time – River-style – to February 2008, when RT was interviewing Kingston on the set of Silence in the Library, in Swansea. She’s wearing a spacesuit. She still looks glam. “He’s my lover,” Kingston says of Tennant’s Doctor, “potentially even – I don’t know whether I’m allowed to say this – my husband. I’m playing that familiarity, and all David has to play is ‘Who is this crazy woman?’ She knows a lot about him, but he had no connection with her at all.”
Two years later, and even the 11th Doctor’s companion Amy (Karen Gillan) was asking, in last week’s episode, “Is River Song your wife?” Kingston isn’t so sure anymore: “I was absolutely certain. That’s what I’d assumed. But when I was reading The Time of Angels, I suddenly thought, my God, she’s his mother!” While Kingston, 47, and Tennant, 39, couldn’t have pulled that off, Smith is 20 years her junior. So is that how she’s playing it this time? A mother/son relationship?
“Well, no, the flirtatiousness between them still indicates they have a much more intimate relationship further down the line – and I sort of hope it is that,” she laughs. “I hope they’re married. Otherwise, if she’s his mother, the flirtatiousness isn’t quite appropriate! Steven [Moffat, the show's lead writer and executive producer] always leaves a couple of doors open a chink, so he can change tack whenever he wants. That makes it exciting to act, but also a little dangerous. She could be the Doctor’s grandmother, for goodness’ sake! I don’t think Steven wants to be pinned down.”
A reluctance to be pinned down is an instinct Kingston understands. She enjoys the thrill of possibility. When she was cast in ER, there was no real sense of who Elizabeth Corday was, and Kingston helped create her. “All that was written was that she was a surgeon from England. They didn’t give much away, as they didn’t know. They were waiting to see how I interacted with the other characters. Then they fleshed her out. That’s not how it always works, but I came in during season three when they were up and running and strong characters already.”
Her stint on ER turned her into a Los Angelino, though she’s not quite at home in the city – “It’s an odd place” – despite making her home there with German journalist husband Florian Haertal, whom she met on a blind date and married in 1998. Their daughter Salone, now nine, was conceived after several fruitless IVF treatments, and Kingston achingly misses her when they’re apart. (She was so affected by her experience conceiving that she championed the HER Trust, a female reproductive health charity.)
Kingston is revelling in returning to Doctor Who, even if her last stint in Wales was during a “rainy, grey February”. If nothing else, it’s a delight at being part of an institution. She loved the series as a child. “I watched it through the crack in the door. The Daleks and the Cybermen! My favourite Doctor was Patrick Troughton.” Interestingly, Smith says the same. “Matt reminds me a bit of him, actually.”
How does the 11th Doctor compare with the tenth? “Matt is a brilliant transition from David, because he has elements of David’s Doctor, though I don’t think Matt’s conscious of that – but he’s very much his own Doctor, too. He’s very bright, and very, very good.”
And from the regal Alex Kingston – who oozes as much gravitas as she does sex appeal – that is high praise indeed.
Benjamin Cook
