Doctor Who season 11 writers were not aware of female Doctor early on
Speaking per SFX in a new interview promoting the new season (premiering next month), Chris Chibnall made it clear that the staff had to be clued in a little bit later on the fact that the show was going to have Jodie Whittaker as the lead — with that, the gender of many lines in the scripts inevitably had to change:
“A lot of drafts of scripts have got ‘he’ in. The writers didn’t know ‒ nobody knew ‒ until that reveal video went out.”
In some ways, it does sound counter-intuitive to not tell some of your own writers precisely what you are working on leading up to the premiere of your new season, but this is obviously a move that Chibnall did to ensure absolute secrecy. Everyone wanted to keep the identity of the Doctor a secret for as long as humanly possible and the more people who know, the greater the risk that something eventually comes out. Think about it this way — if you don’t tell anyone the truth — they don’t have to lie down the road — it is certainly a little bit easier to ensure that nobody slips up even on accident.
Chibnall added in the interview that it’s not as though anyone had to make some sort of enormous change once the news was out about the identity of The Doctor — this is a character whose story is really independent of any physical characteristics. The Doctor is The Doctor male or female, and interacts with much of their environment the same way.
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