8 Doctor Who Actors Who Were Fired Or Quit
Just because the Doctor can regenerate, that doesn't mean the actor playing him or her is safe...
Doctor Who has been around since 1963, and over the course of its broadcast history, thousands of people have worked on the show. Since it first found its way onto the airwaves, there have been a total of 13 main series Doctors and dozens of companions over more than 860 episodes.
With so many years under its belt, one has to wonder if anyone working on the series ever quit or was sacked from the program. It makes sense that an actor or actress might not want to stick around for longer than they initially planned, but it's another story altogether if someone was fired.
That happens far less frequently, but it does happen from time to time. Companions are more likely than others to take a walk from the series, and there have been quite a few. When the series began with William Hartnell in the lead, he was accompanied by his granddaughter, Susan, and two humans, Ian and Barbara.
Jodie Whittaker's Doctor similarly has three people along for the ride, two of whom are said to be leaving prematurely. Then there are those rarer cases where someone was outright sacked, and that list includes the Doctor himself!
8. Nicholas Pegg
The most recent termination to come from the production of Doctor Who came as a result of a poor choice of words being posted in a column in Doctor Who Magazine. Under the pseudonym of The Watcher, Nicholas Pegg wrote the column "A History of Dr. Who in 100 Objects."
He included an encoded message, wherein the first letter of each sentence spelled out: "Panini and BBC Worldwide are c***s." Panini is the distributor of Doctor Who Magazine, so probably best not to have written that, and of course, BBC Worldwide is the marketing arm of the network's longest-running series.
Nicholas Pegg was summarily sacked from the series, and if you don't know who he is, you'd definitely recognize what he's smiling beside in the picture above. Pegg was the actor who bred life into the Daleks for a dozen years, beginning with "Bad Wolf" and ending with "The Witch's Familiar."
He performed alongside every Doctor to take the role since the reboot began in 2005, but his hidden comment didn't sit well with anyone. He was removed from the series before he had a chance to pilot a Dalek in the direction of Whittaker's Doctor to ironically blurt out "EXTERMINATE!"