Doctor Who: 11 Cool Details We Just Learned About Vincent And The Doctor

7. Matt Smith Improvised This Line - Or Did He?

Doctor Who Vincent and the Doctor Matt Smith Karen Gillan Amy Pond
BBC/Twitter: @emmafreud

Midway through the episode, the Doctor finally manages to get Vincent to go and paint the church, with the artist setting up his easel just outside the window that the Krafayis will soon appear behind.

Here, the Doctor - who isn't used to sitting around and waiting - grows extremely bored, and starts rambling on about random things, in an effort to pass the time.

One of the lines he says during this scene is "I remember watching Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. Wow! What a whinger", and according to Curtis, there was something about this piece of dialogue that he just couldn't get right, and so, he ended up rewriting it over and over again.

The writer also revealed that Matt Smith "probably" improvised it. We're not sure why he can't definitely remember if he improvised it, but it's been so long since the episode aired that perhaps Curtis has forgotten what he wrote on the page.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!