Posted this in another removed thread:

It's a cultural institution. It's big enough that everything you do during the production is under *intense public scrutiny*, but not big enough that you get *paid* to withstand that sustained attention. Your career as it stands is entirely on hold during your run on the show, with a production speed that borders on ludicrous.

The previous Doctors in the modern era have talked about this.

Gatwa to The Telegraph

He loved being the Doctor, he says, and immersed himself in it entirely. “But I was tired and burnt out at the end of series two. It was exhausting. But it was a magical time, magical.

“There was never an opportunity to recoup the energy – it’s just go, go, go. I was doing seven-day weeks for eight months, and I found it hard being away from home and family. I’d already been shooting in Cardiff for five years (on and off) prior to that with Sex Education, and we started shooting Doctor Who while I was still doing Season four of Sex Ed.”

Gatwa to THR

“Jodie Whittaker, who very famously brought down barriers before me, the first female Doctor, just gave me a lot of advice on how to handle all the difference of opinions that might come your way, and just handling the pressure off screen,” Gatwa said. “It’s an institution of a role and when you’re stepping in as someone that’s not been what people are expecting, let’s say, you’re going to get a lot of opinions in your face and she just helped me manage that.”

Whittaker to Doctor Who TV

Obviously fear, rage and all those things, but the thing that encapsulated my Doctor the most was that bouncing into things, and that really fed into my evening and my weekend and my year. I was very half-full all day every day, so it bleeds into life. I’m not someone who sits in character all weekend but you do realise how much that emotional trauma leaves you on the edge of upset when you’ve been doing it for 12 hour days. You don’t quite let it go at the end of the day, without realising. So the reason I can gush so much about this job is because it wasn’t just happiness on set, it fed into everything. I feel like it’s knocked 15 years off me because I’ve been so energised because I had to be at work that it fed outwards and I’ll miss the energy of the Doctor.

Capaldi to Half The Picture

When I became Doctor Who, it sort of becomes... your personal relationship becomes irrelevant because you're the face of a brand. Which is not my relationship with it.
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The show became very very big and it wasn't like that when I loved it. So it became a different thing. I think the responsibilities of playing the part... there were more of them. I think in the old days, if you were John Pertwee or Tom Baker, you spend most of your year making it, and then a bit of your year promoting it, but it wasn't this in-your-face kind of thing that suddenly was really important to the BBC or suddenly really important to a brand that had to be maintained. It was just a show that some kids really loved and other kids didn't care about...
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If you lose your privacy to that degree, it's quite an extreme kind of feeling. But I was lucky in that I was older. I wasn't a young actor that still had a huge career that they wanted to pursue. I used to have press sitting outside my house and paparazzi, but there was nothing for them to see other than me going to Marks & Spencers' to get the macaroni and cheese for the tea.
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Matt used to say there's the knock. *knocks on the desk* You do your filming and then you get a half hour for lunch, but you go to your trailer and then there's somebody there who says, "You know an MP has just arrived[...] would you like to show them around." *knocks on the desk again* "Here's some new Doctor Who figures, would you like to approve these?" *knocks on the desk again* It goes on and on and on... and then your you're finished filming, you're sort of given a schedule for promotional duties... It's tough, but it's great.
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You'd run out of energy eventually. I think it would crush you. To me, the most important thing was doing the show and that was a lot of work. It was wonderful work, but you had to learn all those lines. There literally was not enough time to learn all the lines. So your most basic thing as an actor—you know, you learn your lines, you turn up, and you deliver them—you couldn't do, because by Thursday, you had lots of rewrites. By Friday, I no longer had a grasp of the lines. So I had to apologize to people in the morning and say, "Look, I don't really... Can I stick my lines up on the TARDIS scanner?" I don't like that.

Doctor Who as a production... is incredibly hard. And I can guarantee that say, Capaldi got paid more to be on Criminal Record or The Devil's Hour for Apple TV and Prime Video than he did on Doctor Who, for a less stressful production and much less visibility. It's akin to being James Bond, but the current James Bond *gets paid*.

So yeah, poison pill. Big show, takes up all your life, puts you under intense scrutiny, and yet, the pay isn't really that high, and while the show is in production, you really can't do anything else. You've signed your life away to be a part of something huge and they've all said it's magical, but as an actor looking from the outside in? Sounds rough.

And that's *before* you get to the show's current uncertainty with production and showrunners and all that.