TennantFace

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About

TennantFace is an exploitable photoshop meme in which actor David Tennant’s face is superimposed on other base images for comedic effect.

Origin

The original image of Scottish actor David Tennant was taken on the set of the British science fiction television show Doctor Who, in which Tennant stars as the tenth protagonist of the series. While the identity of the photographer or its date remains unknown, the image began circulating online as early as September of 2009.^[4] The photo continued to spread on sites like Uniblog^[5], SodaHead^[6] and Unification.^[7] On November 30th, 2010, the first photoshopped version was uploaded by Tumblr user invisibleduck^[1] and subsequently reposted on the single-topic Tumblr TennantFace.^[2] In the first three years, the TennantFace blog featured over 800 posts.

Spread

On June 19th, 2011, Tumblr user invisibleduck added a definition of TennantFace to Urban Dictionary.^[3] On September 1st, two French fans waited outside a performance of the play Much Ado About Nothing in the West End of London to have David Tennant sign a blown-up picture of the TennantFace, to which he responded "That's just creepy." The same day, a recording of his reaction was posted to YouTube (shown below).

[This video has been removed]

Notable Examples

Additional examples are often posted to Tumblr under the hashtag #tennantface.^[8]

Template

There are several single-topic David Tennant fan sites on Tumblr, ranging from the general Fuck Yeah David Tennant^[9] and All Things Tennant,^[13] to body part specific blogs highlighting photographs of his tongue^[10], eyebrows^[11] and hair.^[12]