Brit TV Preview: Watch David Tennant in The Politician's Husband
Between The Spies of Warsaw, Broadchurch, upcoming drama The Escape Artist and his return to Who for the sci-fi series’ 50th anniversary special, we’re in the midst of something of a Tennant tsunami. And I think we’re all okay with that.
This time around, he’s starring opposite War Horse’s Emily Watson – and sporting some very dramatic hair – in BBC2’s The Politician’s Husband. The three-part drama is a companion piece to the BAFTA-winning The Politician’s Wife (both were written by Paula Milne), and follows the shifting balance of power in a marriage when a wife becomes more successful than her husband.
Tennant plays career politician Aiden Hoynes, a Senior Cabinet Minister whose political fortunes begin to wane just as the career of his wife Freya – a junior minister – starts to take off. Drama ensues.
Will Tennant’s hair ever move? Will he use less product? Stay tuned. (In all seriousness, this looks excellent, and Milne is a pretty fantastic writer. But, eesh, David, the hair!)
On the subject of his new drama, Tennant had this to say, “Filming the drama certainly gave me an insight into why politics appeals to people – particularly that sense of the intoxication of power. And the fact that you’re making decisions that will change people’s lives,” he said. “I can see why people are drawn to it. I can see why people devote their lives to it. There are such huge opportunities there, and such crushing disappointments, too. It’s sort of Shakespearian in that way. It’s like a history play in the making.”
Tennant also commented on his character’s appearance, and apparently that hair is at least partially his fault. “I had a certain amount of say in Aiden’s look. Looking at a lot of the political faces we see regularly on the news, I was struck by how coiffed they are. They often seem to go for a sort of Eighties soap star kind of look. But then of course that’s what is expected, isn’t it? You’re expected to look sleek and slick. And I guess you also need a look that you can contain through a day when you’re doing four different things at once. So I wanted to find something that gave a sense of that.”
Full marks for success there, then.
If you’d like to read more from Tennant on his latest project, playing Aiden and how he put his performance together, the rest of this great interview can be found over at the BBC Press site. It’s worth checking out. Yet another thing to add to my growing list of new BBC series that I sincerely hope find themselves an American distributor…..
