The Doctor is back… with a brand new companion
Meet Varada Sethu's Belinda Chandra, who's about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime with The Doctor.Doctor Who is back, with a new episode materialising onto iPlayer on Saturday 12 April - and the show has a new face for fans to meet.In The Robot Revolution, we will meet Belinda Chandra (played by Varada Sethu), who crosses The Doctor's path when a group of robots kidnap her after believing she is their queen.And that's just the beginning of the adventure for the pair. Writer and Doctor Who mastermind Russell T Davies says: "They are flung into outer space, and for all sorts of mysterious reasons that will be revealed as the series goes on, he can't get her home.
"He's got a time machine that can travel anywhere. But the one place he can't land is that day in May in 2025 when Belinda left the Earth, and that's going to be the ongoing struggle of the entire series – get Belinda home."This means the pair have a different dynamic than the one between The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson).Davies says that at first, the pair are "a little bit more combative," but that "she very quickly realises this is the most amazing person in the universe".
Who is playing Belinda Chandra?
Meet actor Varada Sethu… although she will not need any introduction to anyone who watched the last series of Doctor Who (streaming now on iPlayer).The Indian-born, Tyne and Wear-raised actor previously appeared in the episode Boom, playing Mundy Flynn, the Anglican Marine who met The Doctor on the battlefield.She is not the first companion who has previously appeared on the show playing a different character.Freema Agyeman (who played David Tennant-era companion Martha Jones) played a victim of the Cybermen in the episode Army of Ghosts, while Karen Gillan (who played Amy Pond alongside Matt Smith) played a Pompeii soothsayer in episode The Fires of Pompeii – that also featured future Doctor Peter Capaldi.
Most recently, Sethu also joined the Star Wars universe when she starred in Andor on Disney+. On that Rogue One spin-off, she played Cinta Kaz, the medic to the Rebels of the planet Aldhani.Among her other credits for the BBC are crime comedy Annika and pre-apocalyptic drama Hard Sun.Sethu tells the BBC she got the call to play Belinda just as she was leaving an acting course. "I had just done this intense scene with my scene partner in front of everyone and I was crying and crazy," she says."I was on this high, this buzz, and I got a call from my agent to say, 'do you want to go in for this meeting to go in for the companion?'""She got it on the spot," says Gatwa. "She's that good."Asked what she loves most about her new role, Sethu says: "It's so exciting, and there's so many different genres in each episode. I don't think there are many jobs where you get to do that."Series two of Doctor Who premieres on 12 April 2025 on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK.
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