This upcoming season of Doctor Who sees Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor with a new companion, played by Varada Sethu. Whovians, of course, have seen Sethu before: She had a lead part in 2024’s “Boom” as a soldier in the devastating war on Kastarion 3.
When Sethu got that part, she thought she was done with Doctor Who. “I literally could not believe that I was able to come back,” she said in a press conference with Gatwa that Reactor attended. “I didn’t know there was a history of actors who had played another role and then came back as a companion. So I just thought, once I got to play a guest lead in ‘Boom,’ that that was the shot, and I was very sad about that, because I had such a great time.”
Sethu’s new role is Belinda Chandra, a nurse who apparently has ties to her previous Doctor Who character. “I was very, very curious to see how [showrunner Russell T. Davies] would write in, how he would make a nod towards that connection,” she said. “And I love that he’s managed to tie it into the story, into how and why their relationship is so special… there’s an importance to why the Doctor keeps coming back to this person.”
Belinda, as one of the show’s trailers makes clear, isn’t eager to find herself inside the TARDIS. “They’re very much equals,” Sethu said about her and Gatwa’s characters. “They’re a team figuring out how to get back home. She’s got very much her own life, her own plot, her own main character journey. And when she gets plucked out of that by the Doctor, in some ways, all she wants is to go home. She doesn’t want to be somebody else’s little adventure. She wants to go back to her life. And she challenges him, she holds him accountable. And eventually, they become very aligned, and they realize they need to work together to be this team to get back to Earth.”
Gatwa agreed and called Belinda and the Doctor’s relationship a partnership. “Belinda has absolutely no interest and is not charmed at all by the Doctor at first,” he said with a laugh, adding that they do eventually form a bond that “is just as deep as any that that there’s been, maybe more.”
He continued, “The payoff is that they really value each other and they value each other’s value systems. But yeah, she challenges him and calls him out.”
We can see Belinda and the Doctor’s bond begin to grow when Doctor Who premieres on Disney+ on April 12, 2025.
