Hamlet star David Tennant admits he would be open to donating his actual skull for future use

David Tennant may have won acclaim for playing Hamlet back in 2008, but now he’s interested in a different character from Shakespeare’s tragic tale… one who doesn’t speak at all.

Reflecting on his time as the Danish prince with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Tennant revealed on the Off Menu podcast that he’d be keen to return to Hamlet in a very different role.

He said, “I’d very happily appear again in a production of Hamlet playing a different part, yeah.”

“There’s something glorious about that.”

The part he’s intrigued by is Yorick, the long-dead court jester whose skull Hamlet famously holds in one of the play’s most haunting scenes.

During the RSC production, Tennant didn’t just imagine Yorick’s remains.

He held a real human skull.

The skull belonged to Andre Tchaikovsky, a pianist who died in 1982 and bequeathed his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company specifically to be used in Hamlet.

Tennant explained, “We had a real skull.”

“A guy called Andre Tchaikovsky… had left his skull to The Royal Shakespeare Company to appear in a production of Hamlet.”

“So I did not have to fake any weight there.”

“I was holding Andre, he was Yorick.”

“I was really, really thrilled, not in a macabre way.”

Tennant said the experience added a striking level of authenticity to the scene.

He went on, “That moment in the play is about connecting with mortality, so there’s no acting involved – you’re looking into the eyes of a human who once walked the Earth.”

“There’s something very powerful about that.”

He even joked that he’d be open to donating his own skull one day, though he admitted the legal red tape might make that impossible.

“To be honest, I don’t think you can do it anymore, cos Andre had done it and left it and it had gone through all the various…. there’s a lot of hoops to jump through, for various governmental organisations who perhaps frown on the idea of body parts being left to anything really other than cremation.”

As for the skull, Tennant added, “So I think the laws have now changed, that Andre is probably the last person to have been able to have done that.”

“But his skull is still there, he can be used in future productions of Hamlet.”

The actor, now 53, recently sparked speculation about another comeback, this time to Doctor Who, following his return for the show’s 60th anniversary and ongoing uncertainty about its future.