Archie Panjabi Joins 'Doctor Who' Series 15 As Villain

A new season of Doctor Who means a whole new slate of guest stars. After the new era’s first baker’s dozen episodes drew the likes of Neil Patrick Harris, Jonathan Groff, Jinkx Monsoon and Nicola Coughlan, it seems the long-running British sci-fi series will continue to bring in names familiar to American audiences whether it has anything to do with Disney’s influence or not. The Good Wife alum Archie Panjabi has joined the fifteenth modern series, known in Disney+ circles as the second season, as a villain.

Details are so under wraps that both the BBC and Disney+ have declined to comment. And as series 14 showed, a single actor can play multiple villains made in the same image (even if the character doesn’t quite realize it), and some villains can appear in multiple episodes, so there’s all sorts of possibility. There’s no Twitter record of any production hawks spotting her at any point so unless there was erasure, this casting seems to come as a complete surprise.

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Panjabi is a British actress and Emmy Award winner whose breakout role for American audiences was in the 2002 film, Bend It Like Beckham as Pinky Kaur Bhamra. She is best known for starring as Kalinda Sharma for six of the seven seasons of CBS series The Good Wife from 2009 to 2015. She received three Emmy nominations for the role including her first win in 2010 for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Her subsequent series regular gigs included season 3 of Shetland, season 2 of Blindspot, season 3 of Snowpiercer, the former Peacock original Departure, which she executive produces, and miniseries including I Know This Much is True, Hijack, and Under the Bridge. The film roles that followed Beckham include The Constant Gardener, A Good Year, A Mighty Heart, and most recently 2015’s San Andreas.

Doctor Who returns Christmas Day with the special “Joy to the World”, written by Steven Moffat and starring Ncuti Gatwa as the spacetime-traveling Fifteenth Doctor, joined by Coughlan as the one-off companion Joy. In the new regular season, which will air on the BBC, iPlayer, and Disney+ some time in 2025, he will be rejoined by his first companion, Ruby Sunday played by Millie Gibson in some unclear capacity, and joined by a second companion, Belinda Chandra, played by one of last season’s guest stars Varada Sethu. Jonah Hauer-King, who was Prince Eric in last year’s Disney live action The Little Mermaid remake, was previously revealed to play a character who is a major part of Ruby’s journey. is produced by Bad Wolf, with BBC Studios for Disney Branded Television and BBC. Russell T Davies is showrunner, executive producer and writer. Additional executive producers include Phil Collinson, Joel Collins, Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter.

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Source: Deadline