Doctor Who: 12 Cool Details Revealed In Steven Moffat's Blink Commentary

5. Young Billy And Old Billy Were Almost Played By The Same Actor

Doctor Who Blink Louis Mahoney old Billy Shipton
BBC

While Michael Obiora and Louis Mahoney ultimately ended up playing Billy at different ages, there was initially a lot of talk about using one actor instead of two.

While discussing Billy during the commentary, Moffat revealed that the production team found it difficult to decide whether to go with a single actor (and use prosthetics to make him look older) or two actors.

In the end though, then-showrunner Russell T Davies (along with producer Phil Collinson) felt that audiences wouldn't buy the emotion of Billy's death if he was played by an actor in makeup, because no matter how good that makeup might be, it would still be a distraction. And so, Obiora and Mahoney were cast instead.

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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!