You spend huge chunks of your life on set. How important is home to you?

You get used to making wherever you are a mini home. I over-pack so that there is far too much stuff of mine everywhere, I put stuff on walls to make it feel like my own space. Work is hard in the sense of long hours, but I’m not a nurse in A&E. I get coffee brought to me, somebody gets my lunch, I’ve got friends who make me laugh all day, and I play pretend. This job is so extreme, you can sit for hours waiting for something to be set up.

In that time, you’ve fired off a million WhatsApps, you’ve looked at #braddersbangerz on Instagram [videos of Whittaker’s co-star Bradley Walsh singing in the back of his car], you’ve rung your mate who gets annoyed because, “I can’t answer at 3.15pm on a Tuesday because I’ve got a proper job”, and then suddenly it’s like, “Go, go, go!” and you’ve got to be immediately on it. The main difficulty is realising that, when you get home, people aren’t there to get you sh*t.

How did your childhood in Yorkshire shape you?

I was brought up in a very playful household. I have an older brother and was brought up no different to him. We both did cricket training, we both did football training, we both did squash training. I was unintentionally brought up gender neutral by Mum and Dad. I also had the p*ss ripped out of me, there were absolutely no barriers there so you had to have a sense of humour.

Also, I was encouraged to be off in my own world. We lived in the countryside, I could go off and play and I was allowed to watch films that didn’t always have the right rating for my age, because they knew I was passionate about it. They didn’t laden me with an importance of academia because I’m not academic. For them, as long as I tried, as long as I asked questions, as long as I wasn’t a bully, they were happy.

They thought being able to play on a team and play out with a group of mates was as important as being studious, which was progressive without them realising it. I found most classes confusing except for PE and drama and I realised I had a big enough ego to need to be good at something. My careers advisor said: “Only one in 10 actors make it so you probably won’t.” I was so lucky I went home to parents who said: “If you put all your efforts into your back-up plan, you’ll never do the first.”

You’ve talked about luck a lot.

But it is luck. There’s a drive in me but there’s a drive in a million phenomenally talented artists, musicians, actors. There is also the right place and the right time and Venus [her first film] was my right place, right time. It could have cast the year before I graduated, or three years after I’d left when I’d given up acting because I hadn’t had a job. I was given that very golden ticket. I can take credit for the fact that I did a really good performance, but I didn’t cast myself, I wasn’t my agent who signed me and put me up for it. So, I defy anyone to suggest that there aren’t moments for them that were pure luck.

Jodie Whittaker on how she reinvented Doctor Who