"I left Doctor Who because I could not get along with the senior people. I left because of politics...."

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I left Doctor Who because I could not get along with the senior people. I left because of politics. I did not see eye-to-eye with them. I didn’t agree with the way things were being run. I didn’t like the culture that had grown up around the series. So I left, I felt, over a principle.

I thought to remain, which would have made me a lot of money and given me huge visibility, the price I would have had to pay was to eat a lot of shit. I’m not being funny about that. I didn’t want to do that and it comes to the art of it, in a way. I feel that if you run your career and… we are vulnerable as actors and we are constantly humiliating ourselves auditioning. But if you allow that to go on, on a grand scale you will lose whatever it is about you and it will be present in your work.

If you allow your desire to be successful and visible and financially secure – if you allow that to make you throw shades on your parents, on your upbringing, then you’re knackered. You’ve got to keep something back, for yourself, because it’ll be present in your work.

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— Christopher Eccleston on leaving Doctor Who

Someone added this in the comments:

Just to pick up on something Adam Purcell said much earlier in this thread, I suspect an awful lot of the reasons that Eccleston left the series had to do with the way the production was being run. Bear in mind that it was the first season of a ‘new’ Doctor Who and what they were trying to do was hugely ambitious at the time. The budget wasn’t very huge, the schedule was barely sufficient and it was being shot in South Wales where most of the people involved had never worked on anything like it. This would certainly include a few of the directors, who were largely unfamiliar with the technical demands of the series, which is one of the reasons, as Adam Purcell pointed out earlier, that the first block fell so far behind. And once you fall behind, it’s damn near impossible to catch up. The result is very long hours for the cast and crew, who if they were getting BBC Wales rates were already below BBC London rates, which in turn were below industry standard. I know Eccleston felt very strongly that the crew was often getting a raw deal, and if I recall correctly, he refused to continue working on a day that was going to go into the night. He wasn’t being precious; he just thought if he went home, they would have to release the crew because they couldn’t shoot without him, but I believe they just went ahead and shot with Billie Piper, who didn’t have Eccleston’s clout, plus they basically preyed on her good nature and told her she would be letting everybody down if she didn’t stay. It’s not surprising that Eccleston saw the writing on the wall and (quite wisely) decided to leave. I find it hugely ironic that when the BBC did their big press launch in Cardiff for the new series, Ecccleston had already quit but he had to sit there in front of a packed crowd of journalists and keep it all a secret. I was actually sitting in the front row about three feet in front of him and if he wasn’t happy, you wouldn’t have known it. A class act from beginning to end.

(via alittlekinderthannecessary)

He was awesome.

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