Mention a potential return to Doctor Who and Alex Kingston’s lips shut tighter than the Tardis door in a meteorite storm. But her telltale beam is intergalactic. ‘It would be great,’ she grins. ‘We’ll have to wait and see whether it happens.’
Should the British screen star, who last played the time-traveller’s wife, River Song, in 2015, reunite with the Doctor, it would make for a groundbreaking teatime television first: gay Time Lords (or, indeed, lesbian Time Ladies).
‘I’d love it,’ Kingston gushes, flushing with excitement. ‘In the Christmas special, which was the last thing I did with Peter Capaldi [Doctor Who], writer Steven Moffat had my character say a line where I didn’t recognise him, and I was trying to figure out who he was. And I said, “He reminded me of my second wife.” ’
Rada-trained Alex Kingston, 55, who appears this month in the supernatural thriller A Discovery Of Witches, is best known for her work in Doctor Who and the American medical drama ER, opposite George Clooney
So, River is indeed bisexual? ‘Well, it was certainly implied in that line,’ she laughs.
And despite the exciting gender switch, River is still married to the Doctor.
‘Technically, yes!’ Kingston trills delightedly. ‘Let’s watch this space.’
Prior to Jodie Whittaker’s appointment as the first female Doctor last year, Kingston was initially sceptical about the possibly of a woman Doctor.
‘I felt that Doctor Who was the domain of young boys,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know whether a female Doctor would be accepted by boys. But they’re completely cool with it. They understand that, ultimately, it’s the same person. It’s just a different skin but the same spirit.’
Rada-trained Kingston, 55, who appears this month in the supernatural thriller A Discovery Of Witches, is best known for her work in Doctor Who and the American medical drama ER, opposite George Clooney.
She has commuted between homes in London and Los Angeles for almost 20 years. Subsequently, she knows a thing or two about the dark arts of Hollywood. So what is her take on women in the movie industry in the post-Weinstein, #MeToo era?
‘My feeling is that Harvey Weinstein will get away with it,’ she says evenly, of the disgraced movie producer. ‘I’m worried about what will happen when it goes to trial. It’s going to be so hard to prove, because he can always say that it was consensual.
‘I have to say that, for a long time, I was aware of the talk about Weinstein. Everyone was. I would be told things like, “If you wear a Marchesa dress, his wife’s designer brand, that will please Harvey.” ’
UK actress Lysette Anthony, who has accused Weinstein of raping her in the Eighties, last week claimed that a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign has left her as the only alleged British victim to go public. Kingston pauses with an expression of concern, choosing her words carefully.
‘The women who have come forward are incredibly brave,’ she says. ‘I think there are other women who may have been victims of his abusive attentions who haven’t spoken. He’s been in the business, and was at the top of his game, for a long time.’
Sipping mineral water in a smart Soho hotel, Kingston adjusts her mop of mutinous auburn curls, straightens a shimmering seashell necklace and shifts smoothly from one collection of creeps and ghouls to another.
Alex Kingston, right, with A Discovery Of Witches co-stars Valarie Pettiford, left, and Teresa Palmer
A Discovery Of Witches is the TV adaptation of Deborah Harkness’s beguiling novel, the first book in the All Souls trilogy. The shivery premise is that we live among three creature groups: witches, vampires and daemons, hiding in plain sight throughout our contemporary world. ‘We all probably know which category we’re in,’ chuckles Kingston.
She plays Sarah Bishop, a lesbian witch, who by day ‘makes incense, essential oils and soaps and sells them at farmers’ markets’, but privately prepares more potent potions.
The eight-part series, set in Oxford, features a mysterious manuscript, shadowy magic and genetic skulduggery, and promises to cast quite a spell on its audience. Kingston describes the thriller as ‘definitely adult, with a romantic relationship at its heart’.
I ask her if it’s the kind of entertainment she’d generally seek out of an evening. ‘It’s not my genre,’ she confesses. ‘I’ve never watched any of those sorts of shows like Twilight. I haven’t been interested. But I was really drawn in by this. It’s beautifully shot, and that otherworldly other world is fascinating.’
She admits, with a small shudder, that she has experienced ‘that other world’, and in her deliciously expressive English accent tells a real-life ghost story that starts in a rented house in Highgate, north London, in 2013 as she was rehearsing for ‘the Scottish play, ironically’ as Lady Macbeth opposite Kenneth Branagh.
‘I know a lot of people love Highgate, but I find the energy really dark and I want nothing to do with it,’ she insists. ‘The bedroom of this house was on the top floor, and it had a very strange feel to it. I wanted to sleep with the windows open all the time.
‘Every night, at three in the morning, I would hear this gentle knocking sound coming from the corner of our bedroom.
‘I thought maybe it was the neighbours having sex, but it turned out the neighbour was a judge in his 70s, so that was rather unlikely.’
Kingston didn’t mention the disturbance to her sleeping partner, who remained blissfully oblivious to the interference, as she didn’t wish to alarm him.
‘But I became more and more depressed,’ she continues. ‘I thought it may have been the play, but it was this thumping.
‘Finally, rehearsals finished and I went back to the house. My husband was there with the car and I said, “I don’t want to go back inside, let’s just drive.” We were driving and he said, “Let’s just stop somewhere because I want to talk to you.”
‘We stopped and had some supper and he said, “I don’t know about you, but I had a very, very strange feeling about the house. I believe it was haunted.”
‘He then told me that he’d contacted the owner, who was a builder, and he asked about the history of this house and the owner had finally told him that a woman who lived in the place had killed herself there.
Kingston with Peter Capaldi in Doctor Who. If she returned as River Song it would make for a groundbreaking teatime television first: gay Time Lords
‘My husband said, “I know exactly where she killed herself. It was in the corner of our bedroom… because I saw her every night.”
‘He hadn’t spoken about it because he didn’t want to scare me.’
Kingston’s still-spooked other half is her third husband, TV producer Jonathan Stamp. She was previously married to English actor Ralph Fiennes, who left her in 1996 after more than a decade together, to embark upon an affair with his Hamlet co-star Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior, leaving Kingston feeling ‘worthless and suicidal’.
She recovered and wed German journalist Florian Haertel in 1998, with whom she has a 17-year-old daughter, Salome, before separating from him in 2010.
Kingston remains a modest working actress in an industry where ‘people at the top of the scale earn more than they could ever spend in their lifetime’. Yet her career was hugely boosted by her role in ER, as British surgeon Elizabeth Corday (where she reportedly earned an eventual £66,000 an episode), alongside a handsome young buck by the name of George Clooney.
‘He was fun to be around,’ Kingston recalls. ‘Very funny, very dry. When he wasn’t acting or playing practical jokes, he was playing basketball. His obsession was shooting hoops outside the studio.’
While it is unlikely that she will be crossing scalpels with Dr Doug Ross again, you wonder if she has kept in touch with the slam-dunking hunk.
‘Oh no,’ Kingston replies briskly.
Perhaps, I suggest, she missed a trick there. ‘Yeah,’ she sighs, succumbing to a brief wave of every-woman wistfulness. ‘Probably.’
‘A Discovery Of Witches’ begins on Sep 14 on Sky 1 and Now TV.