TennantFace

2010exploitable imageclassic

Published September 30, 2026

TennantFace is a Photoshop exploitable that pastes Scottish actor David Tennant's gaping, wide-eyed expression, snapped on the Doctor Who set, onto other images for comedic effect. Tumblr user invisibleduck kicked off the format in November 2010, and it grew into a dedicated single-topic blog that racked up hundreds of fan-submitted edits.

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Overview

Edits typically drop Tennant's shocked, mouth-agape face onto celebrities, animals, cartoon characters, or whatever the editor thinks would look funnier with the Tenth Doctor's rubbery expression stapled on it3. The source still comes from behind-the-scenes footage of Doctor Who, and while the photographer was never confirmed, the image was already circulating in fan communities by September 20091. Quality ranges from quick face-swap jobs to more careful blends where the eyebrows and jawline get color-matched to the recipient image. The TennantFace format lived on Tumblr as a reblog gag rather than crossing over to mainstream meme circulation.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr
Creator
invisibleduck
Date
2010

The source photo of David Tennant surfaced online around September 2009, first showing up in a LiveJournal picspam by user _sofiej_ dedicated to Tennant and the Tenth Doctor1. The still then bounced around fan sites including Uniblog2, SodaHead4, and the French Doctor Who fan site Unification (translated from French)5. On November 30, 2010, Tumblr user invisibleduck posted the first Photoshopped version and reposted it to a new single-topic blog called TennantFace3. Invisibleduck submitted a definition to Urban Dictionary the following summer, on June 19, 20116.

How It Spread

TennantFace built its audience through Tumblr's reblog chains rather than through any single viral moment. The dedicated TennantFace blog cleared over 800 fan-submitted entries in its first three years, and the format broke containment on September 1, 2011, when two French fans waited outside a West End performance of Much Ado About Nothing and asked David Tennant to sign a blown-up TennantFace print. His deadpan reaction, "That's just creepy," was filmed and uploaded to YouTube the same day3. The wider David Tennant Tumblr fan ecosystem, which included blogs devoted to his tongue, eyebrows, and hair, gave the face-swap format a built-in audience of remixers who reblogged and submitted new edits under the #tennantface tag7.

How to Use This Meme

Making a TennantFace typically means grabbing the source still, isolating Tennant's face with its distinctive open-mouthed stare, and dropping it onto a target image with enough color-matching to blend. Common targets include album covers, movie stills, animals, and other memes, with posts commonly going up under the Tumblr hashtag #tennantface7.

Frequently Asked Questions