Why Every Lead Actor Left Doctor Who

6. Paul McGann

Paul McGann Doctor Who
BBC Studios

Based on their original runs, Paul McGann is the shortest-serving Doctor of all time – less than 90 minutes in total. But at first, it was hoped he'd get to play the character for a lot longer than that.

The TV movie was intended to kick-start a new series of Doctor Who, a co-production between the BBC and FOX. But despite strong UK ratings, it underperformed in North America, and FOX chose not to go any further.

Like McCoy then, McGann never technically left Doctor Who – he was simply the star of the show at a time when it ran out of steam. No more onscreen appearances were greenlit, though he did reprise the role in the 2001 Big Finish audio drama Storm Warning, marking the beginning of an incredibly successful run in Doctor Who's expanded universe.

In 2003, it was announced that one Russell T Davies had been hired to showrun a new series of Doctor Who. Though Davies decided that the new series would continue where the TV movie left off, he intended to be careful with his acknowledgement of the show's past so as to make it as newcomer-friendly as possible.

To that end, a new Doctor was brought in to lead the charge, and McGann was left without a regeneration scene until 2013 minisode The Night of the Doctor.

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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!