Doctor Who's Varada Sethu: 'Belinda is main character of her own story – not in awe of the Doctor'

“I was depressed, had the holiday blues and just thought, ‘I guess I’m never working again,’” she says, with a rueful laugh. That was when her agent called to let her know that the team at the newly Ncuti Gatwa-powered BBC institution were wondering whether she may be interested in a long-term stint in the Tardis for the show’s forthcoming second season (or, in old money, 15th season).

Her initial response was, well, confusion. Having already filmed a self-contained guest role for the show’s most recent series – as Mundy Flynn, the emotional heart and overly twitchy trigger finger of Steven Moffat’s impossibly tense, ticking-clock episode Boom – Sethu wondered whether the producers had made a mistake. “I said, ‘But I’ve been in it already. They know that, right?’” she recalls.

After being reassured that, yes, they were aware, and that showrunner Russell T Davies had already planned to “write some magic to make it work” (more on this later), Sethu was whisked into a meeting and told the job – playing a new and different character – was hers if she wanted it.

In a few days her blurted, instant “Yes!” was formalised, scripts started to arrive and she was bundled into a read-through. Two weeks later, and barely a month after she’d returned to the UK, she was on set with Gatwa, in costume as the mysterious Belinda Chandra, and on the breathless precipice of taking on what is still among the most coveted, high-profile and high-pressure co-starring roles on British television. Let’s just say that she didn’t have to work too hard to channel the necessary awestruck bewilderment and terror.

“The turnaround was like whiplash,” she admits, detailing an intense shooting schedule that ran from November to last May. “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.”

When we meet, in a quiet corner of a south-east London café, Sethu gives the impression of someone just about coping with the breathless nature of that introductory whirlwind. Diminutive, glossy-haired and stylishly decked out in a chunky, multicoloured tank top, she’s acclimatising to a world of autograph-hunting strangers (“It feels like it’s only the Whovians that can spot me at the moment”) and savouring these last moments before the public get to make their own judgements about the eight new episodes.

“I’m really excited about it because the show has been this intangible, beautiful thing in my head,” she says, setting down a matcha latte. “But the moment it comes out, I’ll have to deal with people’s opinions.” In this respect, Sethu can draw on her experience of working on Andor – Disney Plus’s critically acclaimed, dark-as-carbonite Star Wars spin-off that featured her breakthrough role as flinty rebel fighter Cinta Kaz (the second and final season launches on 22nd April).

In other ways, though, this former veterinary trainee took a route to stardom that, in contrast with her rapid entry into the Whoniverse, has been a lot more circuitous and surprising.

Born in Kerala, India, Sethu has a twin sister and was raised in Benton, near Newcastle, by parents who were both doctors. Though the family moved when she was six, she still remembers the culture shock of swapping coastal India for the banks of the Tyne. “India was a sun-soaked world of tropical plants and fruit, family, love and warmth, and then we came to the UK,” she says, smiling. “And it was just the four of us. And my parents were more stressed because they didn’t have my grandparents [to look after us].” She laughs.

“Obviously, I’m very happy that they came here, but there was a whole assimilation process. There were definitely two versions of myself, [including] the Indian side that I was sadly very keen to tuck away and hide. I wouldn’t have taken curry in for lunch because there would have been comments. There would have been jokes that I would have to then deal with.”

Performing was very much in her blood – her dad had been a singer in his youth and her mother still does classical Indian dance. But beyond school plays, she got an unusual introduction to the arts when she entered and won Miss Newcastle in 2010, at the age of 18. I wonder, which version of Varada was that?

“It was the one that wanted to p*** off my mum,” she says, cackling. She says she was scouted in a shopping centre and signed up in defiance of her mother’s wishes. Winning the contest, she notes with some embarrassment, “was just a fluke. The pageant world doesn’t align with my values. But it did give me the confidence to throw myself into acting.”

A stint in the National Youth Theatre and a role in gritty thriller Sket – made while she was at the start of a five-year veterinary degree in Bristol – followed. However, with her parents believing that performing was a hobby rather than a secure vocation, it took a tearful heart-to-heart with her dad to finally change her path. “I was really unhappy,” she explains. “And so I said, ‘This doesn’t feel like my calling. My calling is acting.’”

After downshifting to a three-year physiology course (“I still had to do a science degree [because] they’re still Indian,” she jokes), she re-entered the world of acting and made up for lost time with roles in Sky action series Strike Back and high-concept BBC cop drama Hard Sun. Next came Andor, then the Doctor Who guest turn that paved the way for Belinda’s forthcoming whirl in the blue box.

Has screenwriter Davies told her what it was about her performance last year that had him wanting to bring her back, continuity be damned? “He said they were in the edit for Boom, kept seeing me and Ncuti on screen and thinking, ‘God, those two have such great chemistry,’” she recalls. “We really are equals in the way that we interact with each other. Russell wanted someone who can push back and not be in awe of this all-powerful being.”

Belinda is, Sethu notes, “the main character of her own story”. She continues: “This mad man has just come crashing into her life, and now she can’t go home to her main plot.”

This sense of a Doctor and companion on equal footing – borne out by the fact that, in contrast to 20-year-old outgoing series regular Millie Gibson and the likes of Billie Piper and Karen Gillan, Gatwa and Sethu are exactly the same age – carried over into the pair’s off-camera relationship. They would retreat to Gatwa’s trailer for lunch (“I went through a phase of smashing through every single Wagamama option,” she says), where Gatwa would give Sethu – a self-confessed “Who agnostic” – vital notes on how to approach the material.

“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,” she says. “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.’”

Vibrant, anarchic playfulness is, in Sethu’s estimation, a signature of this year’s “bright and energetic” new episodes. She’s reluctant to choose a favourite, but Lux – the 1950s-set second episode – is a highlight. “I loved that '50s dress and I actually stole the shoes,” she says.

Elsewhere, the reveal that will link Mundy and Belinda (presumably one of those series-spanning mysteries that Who wheels out so well) sounds typically out there. “I think I honestly didn’t have time to absorb it,” she admits, treading carefully. “It was just like, ‘Cool. That’s that.’” However, for all the technicolor, traditionalist-rattling cheek that awaits (this is, after all, a series that includes a cameo from Rylan in an episode called The Interstellar Song Contest), the significance of a TARDIS team comprised solely of people of colour – a Doctor Who first – was not lost on Sethu or Gatwa.

“Ncuti was like, ‘Look at us. We get to be in the Tardis. We’re going to p*** off so many people,’” she says, laughing. More pointedly, at a time when representative casting in sci-fi and fantasy can still prompt toxicity online, she has been encouraged by the fans’ response to her joining the show. “There’s been a couple of Doctor Woke [references] or whatever, but I just think we’re doing the right thing if we’re getting comments like that,” she says. “Woke just means inclusive, progressive, and that you care about people. And, as far as I know, the core of Doctor Who is kindness, love and doing the right thing.”

The future of the show is the subject of much speculation and mischief-making conjecture at the moment, with the BBC and US partner Disney reporting that they are yet to make a final decision on new episodes (beyond forthcoming Whoniverse spin-off series The War between the Land and the Sea). But would she be keen for another trip, if it’s confirmed? “Mm-hm,” she says, with a nod, perhaps keen not to give too much away.

And in any case, the adventuring that’s currently occupying this fluent Spanish speaker’s thoughts has nothing to do with journeys through space and time.

“Travelling is my favourite thing to do,” she says. “And I’m not done with Central and South America yet. It’s always called me.” She will be hoping that, this time at least, she doesn’t return to a film and TV industry in effective shutdown.

Belinda and the Doctor’s entwined fates may currently be unknown. But whatever happens now, and after a somewhat delayed start to her career, Varada Sethu is very much going places.

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