OOH, imagine being cancelled. How awful! Or is it? Who cares? Cancellers tend to be nutters, self-appointed morality police with a streak of cruelty in their make-up and a predilection for persecution. They should be, er, cancelled. But who cancels the cancellers?

Karen Gillan says cancellation is “not one of my big fears”, which is just as well as she’s starring in a new ITV comedy-drama series called Douglas Is Cancelled, about a breakfast TV anchor, played by Hugh Bonneville, who makes an ill-judged joke at a wedding and finds his tea is oot.

Gillan plays his co-host, to whom he turns for reassurance. But we’re never sure where she stands. When the actress (or actor; don’t want to offend anyone here) herself shot to fame on Doctor Who, initially she peeked online to see what fans were saying, but found it peculiar to read thus about herself and thereafter demurred.

Not that she’d much to worry about. She was a huge success, with minor cavilling from prurient peeps about her micro-skirts and the character’s occasional flirtatiousness. 
After Who, she continued unscathed, yea, even unto Hollywood mega-fantasies such as Guardians Of The Galaxy.

The galaxy is a long way from Inverness, where Karen Sheila Gillan was born on November 28, 1987, daughter of Marie, originally from Glasgow, and John Gillan, originally from Sunderland. John taught wee Karen to read, write and play chess before she even started school, where she was teased for being a redhead. 

“I don’t know why. There are loads of us in Scotland.” Indeed, Karen’s Doctor Who character, Amy Pond, became an inspiration for young redheads everywhere.

In on the act
As a youngster, Karen was, by her own account, “really shy”, which at first made her nervous about performing. But steely determination spurred her on. She left Charleston Academy at 16 to take an Acting and Performance Course at Edinburgh’s Telford Academy, where tutor Scott Johnston – “such a passionate teacher” – became a big influence.

After a year at Telford, she headed to yonder London to attend the Italia Conti drama school. Somewhere around this time, she was scouted by a modelling agency, taking her first stoat doon the catwalk at London Fashion Week in 2007. 

There was also “a lot of hair work”, but acting remained her prime passion and, when a role on Rebus came up, she ditched Conti for Caledonian crime.

Crime famously pays but not enough for a tyro actress, so Gillan ended up pulling pints at The Pilgrim in Kennington, which was useful “for people-watching and learning about life”.

After various minor TV roles, and indeed playing a soothsayer in series four of Doctor Who, she auditioned for a part that “completely changed my life”. To wit, companion to the eleventh Doctor, played by Matt Smith.

She was last to audition and thought she didn’t have “a hope in hell” but, later that night, came the call. It didn’t feel real, she has said, a sensation strengthened by not being allowed to tell anyone, including her mother, a die-hard Who fan with a Tardis money bag and Dalek bubble bath.

Eventually, Karen was able to break the news: “She just couldn’t believe it … She was doing the dishes and she literally stopped in her tracks and cried.”

What about her accent? Could she go for Scottish after Bathgate and Paisley boy David Tennant had adopted Estuary English as the tenth Doctor?

“In my first audition, I did it in an English accent and in my own accent. It was up in the air in the beginning, but then we decided to go with my own accent, which is nice.”

Pond life
MIND, Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor, had given it laldy in Scots, as did Peter Capaldi when he became the twelfth. As for Amy Pond, Karen has described her as “a lot cooler than me”, adding: “She has a different walk from me. She struts. She’s bad.”

Early film roles for Gillan included the thriller Outcast (2010), followed by an indie Scottish romantic comedy called Not Another Happy Ending, about which she declared herself particularly happy to be involved in a Scottish production that “isn’t about drug use or fighting the English”.

In 2013, she appeared on Broadway in a play called Time To Act and, also that year, made her transition to Hollywood, in supernatural horror film Oculus, her first commercial success stateside.

The following year, serious international stardom beckoned when she portrayed Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film Guardians Of The Galaxy, an untrue story about a mysterious orb.

Gillan reprised the role in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2 (2017) and 3 (2023). She played the lead female role, Ruby Roundhouse, in Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle (2017), reprising it in 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level. There were further reprisals, so to say, as Nebula in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).

And there’s been a ton of stuff besides, including roles alongside the likes of John Travolta and Brad Pitt; adventure drama The Call Of The Wild; hitwoman action film Gunpowder Milkshake; Disney TV animation series Rhona Who Lives By The River; sci-fi thriller Dual (earning acclaim for playing a double role); and 2022’s Thor: Love And Thunder.

She’s in recently released crime mystery Sleeping Dogs with Russell Crowe and will be playing Queen Mary Tudor in upcoming film Fools. She has also written and directed films of her own, including The Party’s Just Beginning, set in her home city of Inverness.

A deer friend
SCOTTISH director John McKay has described her as “Bambi on Irn-Bru”, while Matt Smith called her beautiful, talented and, er, “mad as a box of cats”.

Now based in the US, she gets homesick for Auld Scotia, saying: “There’s a part of me that just wants to get a little cottage up in the Highlands and just do that for the rest of my life. But I married an American so I think that’s ruined my plan.”

In 2022, she was “Grand Marshal” leading the New York Tartan Day Parade. She once bewildered her non-Scottish fans by tweeting that, returning to Scotland, she couldn’t wait to get her hands on “chips with chippy sauce”. 

Anthropological note: sauce is put on chips in the more refined parts of Scotland.

Elsewhere, she has declared: “I love chips. They’re the greatest.” Spoken like a true Scot. And they cannae cancel her fur it.