Like every actor who’s played the two-hearted ageless god known across all of space and time as The Doctor, 12th Doctor Peter Capaldi injected the character with a personality reflective of his acting style to create a prickly but kind-hearted regeneration of the beloved Time Lord.
Although Capaldi was a new face to many American audiences, the Scottish actor already had a long filmography before moving into the TARDIS and had even won an Oscar for his appearance in the 1993 short film he wrote and directed, “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.” The strange, trippy 23-minute comedy-fantasy short film follows the titular surrealist author through the Christmas Eve writing journey behind “The Metamorphosis,” the rather bleak 1915 novella about a salesman who wakes up transformed into a giant bug.
Starring Richard E. Grant as Kafka, Capaldi’s vision imagines the author stricken with writer’s block as he struggles to settle on exactly what giant thing his main character should transform into. As the evening progresses, Kafka is plagued by the noise, distractions, and various weirdos co-occupying his crowded apartment building. With its darkly comedic tone and Tim Burtonesque aesthetic, the quirky holiday film tied with “Trevor” for the Academy Award category of best live action short film in 1995.
Peter Capaldi has won a number of other awards
In addition to his early Oscar, Peter Capaldi has racked up a fairly long list of awards, including a handful of Scottish, Welsh, and British BAFTAs. For his work on “The Thick of It,” a hidden gem political satire in which he plays the foul-mouthed, intensely Machiavellian Downing Street spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, Capaldi was nominated twice before finally taking home a British BAFTA for best male performance in a comedy role in 2010.
In 1993, he won a BAFTA Scotland award for best actor in the British comedy-drama “Soft Top Hard Shoulder,” taking home another in 2009 for best acting performance in a film for “The Thick of It” spinoff “In the Loop.” And in 2022, the Scottish BAFTAs honored Capaldi for outstanding contribution to film and television.
Capaldi’s work on “Doctor Who” may not have won him any BAFTAs, but it did earn the actor nominations in both Scotland and Wales. That includes a 2016 BAFTA Scotland nomination for best actor in television and a 2015 BAFTA Cymru (Welsh for Wales) best actor (yr actor gorau) nomination for the episode that killed Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson), “Dark Water.”