10 Doctor Who Background Actors Who Got Themselves Noticed
Those easy to miss Doctor Who actors whose talents broke through our perception filters.
Doctor Who is 60 years old in 2023, and has had a revolving door of the great and good of UK film and TV for the past six decades.
Some of these stars (like Andrew Garfield or Carey Mulligan) have gone on to become Hollywood powerhouses. Others have come in to play one role, before becoming a bigger part of the show's history.
Everyone knows the stories of how Peter Purves, Freema Agyeman, and Karen Gillan all got companion roles in Doctor Who after first playing completely different characters. We also know how Frazer Hines won over the Doctor Who production team to go from supporting character to longest-running classic companion.
But it takes true talent (or clumsy footing!) to make a lasting impression on Doctor Who – or the entertainment industry as a whole – by playing a minor background character.
The following is a collection of those incredibly missable characters whose parts in Doctor Who may be small to the untrained eye, but paved the way for even greater heights in their career, or helped them ensure their place in Doctor Who history.
10. Naomi Ackie
Naomi Ackie is a Doctor Who actor so deeply embedded in the background that you'd be forgiven for forgetting she appeared in the show.
She played the girlfriend of Rigsy (and the mother of his child) in a brief phone call in Face the Raven, and also appeared in a deleted scene from that same episode. Set after Clara's heart-wrenching death, the scene shows her comforting a distraught Rigsy, for whom the Impossible Girl sacrificed her life.
Despite her only onscreen appearance being excised from the finished edit, Naomi Ackie has gone on to great things.
She recently received acclaim for her performance as Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and also played Lando Calrissian's potential daughter Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
She'll also soon be seen opposite Robert Pattinson in Oscar-winner Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17. Doctor Who's loss is very much Hollywood's gain!
In terms of Ackie's work with Disney on Star Wars, it's interesting to note that Letitia Wright – the MCU's Shuri and our brand-new Black Panther – also starred in Face the Raven as Anahson. Small universe eh?