My Journey: Matt Smith
Matt Smith never planned to be an actor. As a teenager in Northampton he played youth football for Northampton Town, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City, until a serious back injury ended his hopes of a professional career. A drama teacher kept encouraging him, eventually persuading him to join the National Youth Theatre in London. It changed everything. With the NYT he played Thomas Becket in T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 2003, a production the NYT staged in Southwark and Westminster cathedrals. In 2004 he played Bassoon in The Master and Margarita at the Lyric Hammersmith. Smith has been direct about what NYT means to him. Smith said the National Youth Theatre is the reason he is an actor, that it completely transformed his life, and that he still cares very deeply about it.
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Matt Smith in rehearsals for Murder in the Cathedral
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Matt Smith as Thomas Beckett in Murder in the Cathedral
Matthew Robert Smith was born on 28 October 1982 and attended Northampton School for Boys. He has described football as so much a part of his identity that losing it left him asking what on earth came next.
He studied drama and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, graduating in 2005. His first professional stage roles included Fresh Kills and On the Shore of the Wide World, which transferred to the National Theatre. At the National he also played Lockwood, one of the pupils in The History Boys, and appeared in the trilogy Burn/Chatroom/Citizenship.
In 2010 he became the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who, earning a BAFTA nomination in 2011. He has kept working on stage alongside his screen career, including in Swimming with Sharks and at the Old Vic during the tenure of fellow NYT alumnus Matthew Warchus.
More recently he has taken a leading role in House of the Dragon. Filming has not always been smooth: he has spoken about an on-set injury in which a helmet struck a disc in his neck. His route from youth football to some of television’s biggest franchises remains one of the most unlikely in the NYT’s history.