Most teenagers rebel against their parents in small ways: sneaking out, stealing a nip of Cointreau, arriving home past curfew. Not Varada Sethu, the Newcastle-raised actor who’s about to grace screens as new companion Belinda Chandra in the forthcoming season of Doctor Who. Her rebellion took on a go-big-or-go-home attitude befitting a future screen star: when she was 18 she entered, and subsequently won, the Miss Newcastle beauty pageant. “Oh my God, I thought that was gonna be buried somewhere!” she exclaims when I bring it up. The whole thing was “kind of an accident”, she explains: “My sister and I were walking around in Eldon Square shopping centre, and they asked us if we wanted to enter, and I thought: ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a go’ – I thought it might piss off my parents a bit!”
The decision to enter definitely caused “a bit of friction”, but Sethu’s parents didn’t raise a quitter. “On the day we had the rehearsals, I called my mum up and said: ‘I don’t want to do this, can you please take me home?’ And Mum was like: ‘Well, you’ve signed up for it, so you’re doing it,’” she recalls. “None of us expected me to win – the whole thing was a bit of a bodge job for me!”
