Ahead of tomorrow's episode of Doctor Who, DWO interviewed Actor, Rufus Hound, who plays highwayman, Sam Swift in '9.6: The Woman Who Lived'.

What was your earliest memory of Doctor Who?

To be honest my earliest memory was probably seeing Sylvester McCoy as The Doctor and being thoroughly confused by the whole thing. Sophie Aldred as Ace though. I do remember that - but for entirely different reasons...

Do you have a particular favourite episode of the Classic Series / New Series - or both?

I only really came to DW because of Russell T Davies. I was an enormous fan of 'Bob and Rose', and 'The Second Coming' is probably my favourite TV drama of all time. So, even though I've now seen a few of the old Classic episodes, I haven't seen enough of them to really 'have a favourite'. I do love Troughton as The Doctor though, more than the episodes I've seen him in (if that makes any kind of sense).

From the new series, Silence in the Library / Forest of The Dead take some beating, frankly. The Doctors Wife was incredibly good too, mainly for Suranne Jones' completely wonderful performance as The TARDIS and Gaiman's writing.

Your character, Sam Swift, was quite honestly one of the best guest cast members we have seen for a while. How was it combing your comedic skills with a TV show you have known and loved for so long, and was there ever an element of ‘OH MY GOD I’M IN DOCTOR WHO’!?

Christ - this answer is going to be long! Well, once I started to focus on being an actor (I haven't done any stand-up now for about four years) my agent asked me "Where are we going with this?" I only gave one answer. "Doctor Who." I realised that if I was going to do this as a career, then I wanted to be a part of the stories I most like being told. Top of the list, therefore, was DW.

So, various attempts to be seen for the show ensued, without much success. However, I then landed a role in Russell T Davies' 'Cucumber', which was cast by the same man that casts Doctor Who - Andy Pryor. 

The day after my episode of 'Cucumber' was broadcast, I got a call from Andy saying that he'd insisted that the top brass on DW watched my episode and that he'd had a call first thing that morning saying 'Offer him Sam Swift.' I was in a car park at the time and just started running around in a circle, whooping.

I got emailed the script that afternoon, and it honestly felt like he'd had been written for just me. He's a swaggering, joke-telling bloke who isn't as smart as he thinks he is. Reading the scenes that he was in, seeing the relationship he'd have with The Doctor... I was vibrating. 

My first day of filming, I was trying to act all cool, but then, in the first take, Peter Capaldi turned to me and delivered my cue and I just kind of lost it. In my head I realised "I'M TALKING TO THE ACTUAL BLOODY DOCTOR!!! ME!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!" It flipped me out a bit. Haha.

We’re soon going to be able to see you in ‘Beautiful Devils’, based on Shakespeare’s ‘Othello'. What can you tell us about your character Archie Hoffman, and what to expect from the movie?

I haven't seen any of it yet, but there are some brilliant people involved in making it, so fingers crossed. What was interesting to me was that by saying 'It's based on Othello', you immediately have a license to look at race/youth/hope/jealousy with an honesty that would feel overblown if you sat down and wrote it from scratch. 

The movie takes Othello as a musical prodigy, the songwriter in a hot band. When they get signed, the record label exec - Archie Hoffman - sacks Iago and thus, out of jealousy for the band's success Iago decides to tear it all down. I shot about five days on it, and the cast are all fairly young, but there's some brilliance in all of them. Hopefully, it'll be ace.

If you could take a round trip in the TARDIS, anywhere in time and space, where would you go and why?

I'd zip forward into the casting office of the next series of Doctor Who and spray-paint SAM SWIFT on the board marked 'NEW COMPANIONS'

+  9.6: The Woman Who Lived airs on Saturday 24th October at 8:20pm on BBC One. 

[Source: DWO]

DWO’s Spoiler-Free Preview of Episode 9.6: The Woman Who Lived:

When the Doctor tried to wait around on Earth in 2012's The Power of Three, he managed to last about three hours before getting bored and feeling the need to whizz back off into time and space. He's over 2000 years old, but he fills his time with adventures and monsters and being really sort of marvellous. Imagine, though, being immortal and stuck on Earth permanently. Watching the world around you evolve and change, wither and die and flux... While you just stay still at the heart of it all.

That's very much the position in which we find Maisie Williams in The Woman Who Lived. When we left her last Saturday, she'd been an integral part of saving the day - and she'd given her life in the process. Brought back with some handy alien tech and made immortal, she was left behind while the Doctor swanned back off into time and space. A couple of days stuck in one Viking village was more than enough for him.

This week's story throws the Doctor back in to the world of the girl he left behind, and forces him to acknowledge that he doesn't always make the right decisions. Separated from Clara for much of the episode, the Doctor is forced to team up with the immortal girl on the hunt for a dangerous alien artefact, and despite all the running and robbing, the hanging and the fire-breathing cats, there's a very human story here between two people who are so close but so far from being a part of the species.

Perhaps less about action and monsters than last week’s episode (and even there they weren’t particularly at the forefront), The Woman Who Lived manages to walk the line well between some laugh-out-loud humour and some real, serious emotion. There’s a lot of deep ideas buried away in the library here, and finding out first hand what it’s like to live for so long is perhaps one of the saddest things the programme has presented us with for some time. 

If there's a standout in the episode, though, it's not in the emotional exploration of an eternal life - but rather in Rufus Hound's turn as the highwayman Sam Swift. There's often a bit of discussion generated around casting comedians in the series, but this is a character who simply couldn't be brought to life by anyone without the superb comic timing Hound brings to the part. It's safe to say that he's rocketed up the list of people we'd like the Doctor to bump into again!

Five Things to Look Out For:

1) “Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through like fish in the night…”
2) You can’t just rip out the painful memories.
3) “How many Clara's have you lost?”
4) The Doctor has been checking in on Maisie’s character…
5) “This is banter. I’m against banter.”

[Sources: Doctor Who Online, Will Brooks]