“I don’t think I’d ever really been seen as the lead, the female heroine… I don’t know – the love interest,” says Millie Gibson.
Throughout her decade on screen, the 21-year-old has made a name for herself playing gutsy, outspoken female characters. After spending her teen years playing troubled schoolgirl Kelly Neelan on Coronation Street – a role that won her a British Soap Award and celebrity status in her home city of Manchester – Gibson turned 18 and left the soap, powered by a come-what-may desire to “see what happens”.
What happened was a little series called Doctor Who. An audition came up for the sci-fi series, and just two months after her Corrie exit, Gibson stepped out of the TARDIS live on Children in Need, unveiling herself as Ruby Sunday, Ncuti Gatwa’s first (and the Doctor’s youngest-ever) companion. The whole thing was “such a whirlwind”, Gibson says.
But today, Gibson has a moment to catch her breath. She’s speaking to me over video from the kitchen in her Manchester home, wearing a baby-blue jumper and with skin so luminous it could reasonably be considered its own light source. She’s chatty and energetic, of course, but with a clear-eyed thoughtfulness and maturity befitting someone far older.
Gibson’s stint back home comes after a summer away filming series two of period drama The Forsytes. The first series, based on John Galsworthy’s Nobel Prize-winning novel series The Forsyte Saga, arrives on 5 this week, and is primed to become the nation’s next cosy autumn watch. Fans of Bridgerton, My Lady Jane, and the plethora of period dramas that have proliferated in recent years will find The Forsytes suitably swoonworthy. It’s got the gowns, the scandal, and the ensemble cast of period drama heavyweights, including Tuppence Middleton, Jack Davenport and Eleanor Tomlinson.
Set in the late 1880s, the series centres on upper-class English society by way of the titular family of wealthy stockbrokers. Gibson’s Irene Heron is a dancer and the orphaned daughter of bohemians, who becomes the “black sheep” of the family when she marries the ambitious Soames Forsyte (Joshua Orpin). To Gibson, it was an intriguing prospect – not just because she got to speak in RP and wear “a 20-inch red wig”, but because she finally got to play the female heroine role that had thus far eluded her.
Gibson credits The Forsytes scriptwriter Debbie Horsfield for putting focus on the female characters, where the novels are more “male-led, and the females are more like an accessory rather than a main focus”. How does Gibson think she herself would fare in genteel 19th-century society? A cackle: “They’d hate me!” she insists. “I tell you, Mancunians wouldn’t survive in those times. We’d be absolute nightmares.”
Growing up in a small village in Tameside, Gibson got her first taste of acting – and first agent – at Oldham Theatre Workshop, landing a role in CBBC series Jamie Johnson aged 11, which Gibson now says she “sounds like a chipmunk in”. Since then, any dramatic training has been experienced on set. She and Gatwa would often joke that Doctor Who left them with “stacked” CVs, teaching her to combat-fight and handle weapons as well as dancing techniques she would later pick up again for The Forsytes.
Her years on Corrie were just as formative. She was originally cast in the long-running soap for just a handful of episodes at just 14. Filming often meant skipping classes at school with boys she fancied, but Gibson came around to acting eventually and when Kelly was later brought back for an extended run of episodes, Gibson dropped out of sixth form. “Which wasn’t a big heartbreak,” she clarifies, nonchalantly.
Fame didn’t really impact her much, until she turned 18 and started going on nights out in Manchester city centre and became “a little bit paranoid… kind of looking over my shoulder all the time”. If anything, being so well known in her home city (where Corrie is both filmed and is the soap of choice) over-prepared her for Doctor Who fame. “I was literally leaving the house like, ‘Come on, everyone, come and approach me,’” she remembers of the days after her casting announcement.
Somewhat surprisingly, Gibson says she never felt as famous from Doctor Who as she did when she was on Corrie. But the show brought her so much else, namely her friendship with Gatwa, whom she confirms is “probably the most charismatic person you’ll ever meet” and made her “up my game”. “I think he makes me a better actor,” she says. “Watching him become the Doctor… I felt like I had the front row seat of witnessing greatness.”
Gatwa and Gibson’s arrival signified a desire for Doctor Who to return to its 2005 glory days, with a global streaming deal with Disney (the future of which is unclear) and the return of former showrunner Russell T Davies. Fans and critics – me included – compared the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby’s playful, platonic dynamic to that of Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor and Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler.
In fact, the comparisons were so blatant that Davies insisted Gibson chop her hair into a short bob, lest she look “a bit too much like Billie”. You can spot the similarities in the characters: two young, blonde women from working-class backgrounds. Still, it’s easy to forget that Piper, also a former teen star, was 23 during her first series. Even with her experience, handling this increased scrutiny as a just-turned-19-year-old was a whole other ball game, Gibson learnt, when a tabloid report emerged in the summer of 2023 claiming that she had been acting like a “diva” behind the scenes.
Gibson didn’t comment on the claims at the time – not when the allegations first emerged, nor when new reports half a year later claimed that she’d been “dropped” from the show before her first series could even air. That wasn’t the case: Gibson had known that she was coming back for series two when the “diva” reports came out.
Unfortunately, revealing this would have jeopardised the series’ tightly wrapped plots, putting her in a “tough” position where she wasn’t “able to speak up” and defend herself. “I couldn’t be like, ‘It’s a lie!’ [because] they’d be like, ‘Well, that’s spoilers,’” she says. “It was quite hard to stand up for myself without ruining the show. I was like, ‘Oh, this is horrific because it just looks like it’s true.’”
It must have been pretty unpleasant, reading this about herself at such a young age. “Oh, it was awful,” she says, an obvious pang of pain in her voice. “What was frustrating was the amount of people that were like, ‘Oh, sorry, this has happened mate,’” – referring to her inaccurately reported removal from the show – “and I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s not [happened], but thank you.’”
If she took anything away from the experience, it was the way those close to her rallied in private. Gatwa – who faced his own negative attention when he was cast as the Doctor – was a particular comfort. “He’s had his time with that, and it’s just about just being able to try and shut it out,” she says.
I can see where Gibson’s level-headed maturity comes from. Since adolescence, she’s been living tandem lives – a consistently busy actor in popular projects in one lane, a regular person living in her hometown in the other – and has somehow done both successfully. The highs are thrilling and the lows tough, but Gibson is used to it by now. “It will happen again, about something else, probably,” she reasons. “It’s just about smiling and waving and not really letting it get to you.”
‘The Forsytes’ starts tonight at 9pm on 5
