As July ends and August begins, the publicity campaign for Series Eight continues in earnest, with a variety of interviews and in-depth features published in The Sunday Times, Empire, SFX, and Entertainment Weekly over the last week. Here are some choice cuts from the above, which are all available now.

On the show’s direction:

Steven Moffat: “It was time to change. Certain things we were doing a little reflexively. Some of the humour was getting a bit glib. One of the hardest things to notice is when your new idea has become your old idea and it’s time to get rid of it.” (Empire)

Peter Capaldi: “We still blow a lot of shit up. That’s very important, but it’s going to be a bit different from what we’ve seen over recent years. A bit more gravity. Some situations are a bit more sombre and I think there are more rooted dramatic scenes…. we have another level of drama, another tone. And the scenes are longer.” (Sunday Times)

Jenna Coleman: “It’s amazing how different it feels. It’s darker. The limits feel like they’re being pushed more in terms of the danger and the dread. It’s scarier, that’s for sure. A producer once told me this is the hardest job because you’re creating characters and telling stories while always on the run. But Steven’s changed the format quite a lot. We have much longer scenes now.” (Empire)

Ben Wheatley: “For me, they’re back to classic Who, or the mid-Tennant adventures, where you’d tell a story and move on to the next one, less tied up in the final machinations of long plot arcs.” (Empire)

On the New Doctor:

Capaldi: “He’s more alien than we’ve seen him in a while, and he is less patient with the foibles of human beings. Somewhere in the regenerative process, human beings have lost their charm for him. But they begin to work their magic eventually.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“It can become a kind of franchise where it’s not a real character at all but just an amalgam of elements that people think are Doctor Who: a scarf, a bow tie… I wanted to be the actual Doctor Who. (Empire)

Wheatley: “Capaldi’s his own man but there are elements of Baker and Troughton and Pertwee. He’s inherently funny but inherently brooding and complicated, as a performer and a man.” (Empire)

Mark Gatiss: “I’ve seen quite a bit of him and he’s absolutely fantastic. Peter’s just got this amazing, fierce, funny, slightly alarming quality to him – he reminds me a lot of Alastair Sim, actually. You’re not quite sure where you stand with him; he’s very funny, but he’s got this glint in his eye and I think it’s a terrific run of episodes.”

“The brilliant thing about Doctor Who is that it’s always changing like the central character – not just the face of the actor, but the direction of the show. David and Matt were both wonderful, but both were very human Doctors and I think it’s time to remind people that the Doctor isn’t always like that. He’s that sort of Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee and even Christopher Eccleston style actually: it’s someone who’s not immediately going to be your best friend and can be quite abrupt and rude.” (Islington Herald)

Capaldi’s casting

Capaldi:“I wouldn’t have thought it would be me – because of my age. I would have thought they were automatically heading younger. I’m technically too young for the part, because he’s over 2,000 years old.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Moffat: “I did say, ‘No, we probably won’t end up with another quirky young man. I didn’t think there was any space around Matt to have another Doctor of that kind, because he sort of sums up what you could do with that. I very very quickly, very quickly just thought about Peter. There is no right age to be the Doctor.” (Entertainment Weekly)

On Clara’s relationship with the Twelfth Doctor:

Coleman: “With Matt’s Doctor [Clara] felt quite safe, really, she knew she’d be caught if she was in danger, but this guy is a lot less human-friendly and a lot less patient. He’s more removed and inaccessible. You can’t quite access him in the same way.” (Empire)

Capaldi:“There’ll be no flirting, that’s for sure. It’s not what this Doctor’s concerned with. It’s quite a fun relationship, but no, I did call and say, ‘I want no Papa-Nicole mo–ments.’ I think there was a bit of tension with that at first, but I was absolutely adamant.” (Sunday Times)

On Clara, and Danny Pink:

Coleman: “It’s like seeing a control freak out of control. She has a boyfriend and she’s a schoolteacher and then she travels around the universe with The Doctor. She’s trying to live those lives separately and not let them collide.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Brian Minchin: “He’s (Danny) a teacher at the same school as Clara. Clara decides she’s not going to leave her life behind to go travel in time and space. She’s starting a relationship with Danny so she’s going to keep both lives going at once.” (Entertainment Weekly)

On Capaldi’s costume:

Moffat: “He wanted to be quite stark, stark and skinny. A stick-insect sort of thing. Clara actually calls him a grey-haired stick-insect at one point. We had some hilarious pictures of Peter just dressing up. It was all coming from him because he’s really into his clothes. I didn’t feel qualified to go and chat too much about it. Certainly the costume didn’t go anywhere until I shut up. The thing I’ve learned about showrunning is you need to know the bits you’re bad at!

“I’ve got certain things that I’ll say – I don’t want anything in that costume that I have to write into the script. I don’t want people saying ‘But why are you dressed as a circus clown?’ I want him to walk into a pub, a restaurant, a space conference, an army base and nobody stares at him.

“There was an issue simply because it’s quite dark as a costume and it’s a show that largely takes place in a tunnel. I kept saying ‘We are going to be able to see him, aren’t we?’ I suppose the red lining helps, when the flaps are open.

“I think there’s always something a little bit formal about the Doctor. Oddly enough in this series, for whatever reason, he seems to be wearing different outfits far more often than the Doctor normally does. He’s got his basic outfit but he’s in a spacesuit in one of them, and he’s a caretaker in another one and then he’s all dressed up in a later episode. He does vary it a bit. And he mixes up the basic costume, hugely. We’ve tended to see the white shirt version in public but actually the one I like best is when he wears the jumper under his coat. I think he looks like a submarine commander, like an old sailor or something. It makes him all rugged and handsome!” (SFX)

Jenna Coleman on Series Eight guest stars:

Keeley Hawes

“She’s great. She’s playing this naughty but nice, really sexy villain who kind of kills you but with a sweet smile.”

Foxes

“She’s really cool, I know her personally as well. I don’t actually know how much I can say about it but it’s a very clever way in which she is brought in and—what can I say?—there’s music!”

Frank Skinner

“He is a huge, huge, huge Doctor Who fan. We’d do scenes between me and Peter and then you’d often just see Frank basically soaking it all up and just really really enjoying being on the TARDIS and the whole experience. It was funny to have a proper, proper fan who really does know everything about Doctor Who folklore.”
(Entertainment Weekly)

Capaldi’s monster wish list:

Capaldi: “Axons appeared as these kind of god-like creatures, but underneath they were festering bags of flesh. I’d love to see a modern version of that. I’d also like to see—this is really one for geeks—the return of the Mondasian Cybermen. They came from the planet Mondas and first appeared in The Tenth Planet. They were absolutely terrifying, with cloth faces. That was really creepy.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Moffat:“I always thought the Axons had a natural resemblance to a BAFTA. “We’re not bringing those [The original Cybermen] back, because they look like boys with sweaters pulled over their heads. But Peter and I are not having a fight about which Cybermen are better.” (Entertainment Weekly)

On rumours of the return of The Master:

Moffat: “There’s always that rumour. It didn’t come from us.” (Entertainment Weekly)