When Varada Sethu was studying veterinary medicine, she spent a lot of time distracting herself with sci-fi.
“I was miserable and I wanted to be an actor [and] I would doodle a cartoon me holding a lightsaber and wearing a space suit,” she tells me over Zoom. Years passed, and when she was moving house, she found the doodle again. “That was really powerful. Oh god, I actually got to do it. Seven years later.”
As a self-professed Star Wars mega-fan, Sethu has ticked off a lot of dream jobs. She’s played an assassin in Andor. She’s appeared in the Jurassic Park franchise: another great passion of hers. And two years after her Star Wars debut, Sethu appeared in Doctor Who as a guest star on Ncuti Gatwa’s first season as the Doctor. She played a doomed space marine, Mundy Flynn – one of the only roles she’s ever had that she didn’t have to audition for.
Clearly, she made an impression, because now, she’s back as companion Belinda Sethu: lead billing, alongside Ncuti Gatwa, in one of the longest-running TV franchises in history. Rebooted in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston, the show has seen six new iterations of the time-travelling Time Lord come and go, as well as countless companions: Catherine Tate’s Donna, Karen Gillan’s Amy, and now Sethu.
It’s a star-making role, but she’s not getting stopped in the street yet. Or at least, not as much as her co-star Gatwa.
“Every single time I've been out with Ncuti, people look at him,” she says. “He deals with it so gracefully and he's so wonderful, but I always think I don't know how I'm going to cope with that. Because every single time there's always someone and they're so well-meaning, but I think, I just want to go to the shops. I just want to buy my oat milk. I don't like talking to people.”
She’s going to have to get used to it, but at 32, Sethu’s explosion through the TV stratosphere is the payoff of a decade or more of hard graft and experience.
“I just want to buy my oat milk. I don't like talking to people”
It’s time that she says she’s grateful for. “I think when I was younger, I was very, ‘why haven't I blown up in the way that I wanted to?’” she says.
“But I cannot be more grateful that it’s come at this time in my life when I have a much better grip on my mental health. “When you're in the public eye, so much of that is navigating other people's opinions of you. It is pressure and I try not to engage with it. I try to carry it as fuel rather than a heavy load. I don't want it to be a burden.”
Born in Kerala, India, in 1992 and raised in Tyneside, the young Sethu grew up with doctor parents who were also passionate about the arts: her mother was a dancer, her father a singer.
She followed in their footsteps and did “a lot of classical Indian dancing from a very young age. It just gave me an inherent confidence in being expressive and being comfortable with my skin and my body and storytelling.”
“I cannot be more grateful that it’s come at this time in my life when I have a much better grip on my mental health”
As Sethu got older, she turned to drama, which she loved so much that she was nominated as her school’s ‘drama prefect’. Yes, it’s a title, but she tells me it was basically a case of putting herself forward for the role. Apparently, it was “very easy — if you're super keen and everyone else sees it as the doss subject.”
She watched Doctor Who casually over the years — “the David Tennant episodes” — but doesn’t hesitate when I ask what her area of expertise is. “I love Star Wars. Star Wars is my thing.”
Sethu watched it as a child and turned to it again at university. Despite studying to be a vet, she never let go of acting and eventually quit her degree to pursue her passion full-time: first travelling down to London from Newcastle for casting calls, then moving here full time.
In 2022, her persistence was rewarded with a role in Andor, playing female assassin Cinta Kaz — as well as one half of the Star Wars universe’s first openly queer romances alongside Faye Marsay’s Vel Sartha.
“Some of the public can be quite disbelieving of women in action roles. I think Faye and I were both kind of wary of what [backlash] we might end up receiving, but there was nothing,” she says.
“I remember my sister saying, ‘You should turn off your comments,’ because there were so many other shows that were getting racist comments or people trolling them. And we just didn't get anything. So that kind of reaffirmed my faith in humanity a bit.”
This positive experience aside, she is still conscious of the added pressures of being a South Asian woman in acting, and in the sci-fi space. “It's quite common for minorities to feel like we have to do well,” she says. “We can't fail. We can't let the team down because it reflects badly [on us]. That's not a very helpful pressure to put on yourself at all and I try my best not to.”
Representation is also something she feels there is “always a long way to go” to achieve. “I think sci-fi is probably one of the few places, where – because it's set in the future – it tends to be more diverse than a lot of daytime TV,” she adds. “But why can we portray progressive societies, but always in the future? Why can't we establish that now?”
“It's quite common for minorities to feel like we have to do well”
When she played Mundy Flynn, she made such a good impression that when the time came to cast a replacement for Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, Sethu was called in and offered the job on the spot by the showrunner, Russell T. Davies. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of, but there’s a dark flipside.
In recent years, the show has also come with trolling – both Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa’s announcements as leads were met with outrage and unacceptable sexist and racist abuse by a certain section of the Who fanbase – but Sethu says that she wasn’t worried.
“It didn't really occur to me. I think I got it and everything happened so quickly. It was probably midway through filming, that I thought, ‘oh, this might be received in a weird way.’ But I kind of processed that a bit already with Andor.”
And there’s a lot more attention to come. Hot off the back of filming Doctor Who, Sethu is bursting with ideas about what she wants to play next. “I just it would just be fun to be on horseback and in a corset maybe — or maybe a pirate. It's a pirate. I want to be a pirate.”
She’s already got some of the world’s biggest franchises under her belt, but there’s one more to tick off, too. “I just need Indiana Jones. That's my other favorite one. It would be fun to play a bad guy.”
With her track record, don’t be surprised to see her on the big screen opposite Harrison Ford soon. For Sethu, the sky is the limit – or perhaps that should be outer space.
Doctor Who season two is streaming now on BBC and iPlayer
