1 week Ago
Varada Sethu will star alongside Ncuti Gatwa as Belinda Chandra, after Millie Gibson's Ruby Sunday decided to stop travelling with the Time Lord. Fans might recognise Sethu from the previous series, playing the character of Mundy Flynn in the third episode titled 'Boom.' It remains to be seen if anything surrounding that character will link to Sethu's Belinda Chandra.
Ahead of the new series, here's all you need to know about Varada Sethu and where you might have seen her before. Verada was born in Kerala, India, on May 12, 1992 and moved to England at a young age. She grew up in Benton, which is an area near Newcastle in the northeast of the country.
In her childhood, she was a member of the National Youth Theatre before going on to study veterinary medicine at the University of Bristol, later switching to physiology. After that, she continued her acting education at the Identity School of Acting in London. Back in 2010, she made her first appearance on screen in a short film called Impressions.
Varada at first made small appearances in a number of TV shows, including Doctors, New Blood and Doctor Foster. Additionally, she had a very small part in the 2016 heist film Now You See Me 2. She started becoming part of more established casts in shows such as Hard Sun, Strike Back, Annika and the Disney Star Wars series Andor in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Varada also had roles in the blockbuster hit Jurassic World Dominion and the Netflix crime-thriller film I Came By. In an interview with the Radio Times , Varada revealed she got the role as the Doctor's companion not long after arriving back in London from a five-month sabbatical of travel in October 2023. This was in the midst of an industry-wide actors’ strike that meant a planned job had very suddenly fallen through.
However, after getting the call from her agent saying the team at Doctor Who wanted her for a more permanent role than her initial guest appearance in the first series, she was soon on set again. She said: "The turnaround was like whiplash. I was dropped into [filming] within two weeks of being told I had it.
So a lot of the confusion and stress that [Belinda is] going through is the confusion and stress that I was going through.” Recommended reading: Discussing the storylines on the show, she revealed: "Everything is so ridiculous and mad [in Doctor Who] that if I were to actually play it how I, as a human, would, I’d be having a mental breakdown all the time. “You have to find the joy, the humour, and you have to push it.
Ncuti was like, ‘Lean into it. That’s where the fun comes.’” Doctor Who Series 2 returns at 6.
50pm on Saturday, April 12 on BBC One..
