The new season of Doctor Who will star Varada Sethu as the companion.
Following the decision of Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday to cease travelling with the Time Lord, Sethu will co-star with Ncuti Gatwa as Belinda Chandra.
Sethu may be familiar to fans from the last series, where she portrayed Mundy Flynn in the third episode, Boom.
With excitement about Doctor Who currently at fever pitch – the new, fifteenth season is set to land on BBC iPlayer and BBC One this week, on April 12 – we can’t help but think about the future of the show.
• Read more: Doctor Who bosses were in talks with a non-binary actor before Ncuti Gatwa
So who is Varada Sethu? Here’s all we know about the Doctor’s soon-to-be companion.
Born in India, raised in Newcastle
Sethu was born in 1992 in Kerala, India. Her parents are both doctors, and she has a twin sister called Abhaya. When she was young, her family moved to the North-East, and she grew up in Benton, near Newcastle upon Tyne.
As a teenager, Sethu was interested in acting: she was a member of the National Youth Theatre and won the 2010 Miss Newcastle competition in her final year of sixth form. She’s also a longtime practitioner of Bharatanatyam and Mohiniyattam, forms of Indian traditional dance.
Despite her theatre background, she studied veterinary medicine at Bristol University, later switching to physiology, before going onto study at the Identity School of Acting in London.
She’s appeared in Doctor Foster and Annika
Sethu’s onscreen career started slowly. She made an appearance in the 2010 short film Impressions as Samena, and then appeared in Malayam-language film English: An Autumn in London in 2012.
“I really enjoyed it,” she told The Hindu about the experience. “I didn’t struggle as my character was born and brought up in the UK and did not have any lines in Malayalam. I can’t really read Malayalam. But it was great to be working in a set where everyone spoke my language and had great Indian food. It felt like a family.”
After that, she appeared as Peaseblossom in a 2016 film adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and also featured in Now You See Me 2, opposite Michael Caine and Daniel Radcliffe – as well as the blockbuster Jurassic World: Dominion. More recently, she starred as Aisha in two episodes of the Suranne Jones thriller Doctor Foster, and as DS Harper Weston in the 2022 BBC show Annika.
Though she’s currently working in the UK, Sethu has also expressed an interest in returning to Malayam-language parts, “If it’s a good role and script... but I can’t straddle both worlds, and right now I know the career that I want to build is in the British and American market. It is impossible to do a film elsewhere without taking time away from this.”
Her big break was in Andor
In 2022, Sethu played rebel Cinta Kaz in Disney+ series Andor: her character is one of the people who helps execute the rebel heist on the planet of Aldhani, opposite Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor.
“She was written as someone who doesn’t speak a lot, but when she does, she holds a presence,” Sethu said of her character. “I think Vel (Faye Marsay) was described in the script as someone who is physically powerful and commanding, and Cinta is the one who looks meek, and may not be capable of violence. So it’s a shock when people see her in action.”
She also spoke about her character’s romantic relationship with Marsay’s Vel, a woman. “I loved that it’s not made a big deal of. It’s just like something that exists, and other team members just accept them,” she said.
“I expected there to be loads of people picking up on it, and there really wasn’t. That’s actually even more beautiful because, ideally, it shouldn’t be a big deal at all.”
Her Doctor Who character
Sethu played Mundy Flynn in the fourteenth season of Doctor Who.
This time round, she will portray Belinda Chandra, who is abducted by a group of robots that think she is their queen and who happens to cross The Doctor's path.
Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies revealed to the BBC: “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.”
Davies adds that we can expect a different dynamic between the Doctor (Gatwa) and Sethu compared with the ones before.
He 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".
Doctor Who season 15 will premiere on BBC iPlayer at 8am on Saturday, April 12. It will premiere on BBC iPlayer at 8am and will also air on BBC One at 6.50pm.
