Jodie Whittaker has praised the decision by Gareth Southgate to bring a psychologist into the England camp, calling it revolutionary at a launch screening for the new film Dear England. Whittaker, who plays Pippa Grange in the adaptation, spoke at the event about Southgate’s time as England manager and the pressure on young players.

Dear England stars Joseph Fiennes as Sir Gareth Southgate and follows the manager’s spell in charge of the national side, when he took England to two European Championship finals and a World Cup semi-final. The story first reached audiences in a successful West End production, also starring Fiennes, before the adapted it for television.

Whittaker said the move to bring a psychologist into the set-up stood out because the brain is too often treated as an afterthought. “It was revolutionary of Gareth to bring in a psychologist for the team,” she said, adding that mental health is now a major topic of conversation in 2026. She said “a pair of feet can be insured for however much, and then the brain is kind of left to fend for itself,” and argued that, with such young and talented players, the psychological pressure was one of the hardest things to harness.

That is where Grange comes in. Whittaker said bringing in someone like Pippa was essential because Southgate understood better than anyone how hard it is to manage pressure at the highest level. The role has become one of the defining ideas in Dear England, which looks at the England manager’s attempt to reshape a side long weighed down by expectation.

Fiennes said the stage version helped bridge two audiences that do not usually meet. He said the play introduced football fans to theatre and theatre lovers to football, and that he was grateful the wanted to take the production further as a TV series. He said half of the theatre audience had never really engaged with football, while the other half had never been to theatre, but were drawn in by the England story.

The adaptation arrives with those themes intact. Based on Southgate’s years in charge, Dear England uses football as the frame but keeps returning to the wider questions around leadership, masculinity and mental health that made the stage production connect beyond the sport. For Whittaker, the appeal is plain: Southgate’s decision to treat psychology as part of performance is no longer unusual, but the story shows how early, and how deliberately, he made that choice.

That is why the screening lands with force now. The film is not just revisiting England’s recent tournament runs; it is also arguing that the mind matters as much as the body, and that Southgate saw that before much of the game did.