Anyone who’s ever braved a spray tan knows there are rules that must be followed. Number one? Avoid water in the immediate aftermath, or risk being plagued by awkward streaks. That means no showers, no rain storms, and definitely no tears. So when, one evening last year, a freshly tanned Millie Gibson picked up her phone to learn she’d been cast as Doctor Who’s new companion, Ruby Sunday, her immediate priority “was not to cry it off”, she laughs. “I thought: ‘They’re not going to be able to redo my face, so I’m going to have to hold this in!’”
The night in question occurred just before the National Television Awards in October 2022, and Gibson, now 19, was preparing to walk the red carpet with her Coronation Street castmates. She’d played trouble-prone teen Kelly Neelan on the ITV soap since 2019, but had decided at the start of the year to leave her steady gig on the cobbles. “I’d thought: ‘I’m so young, why the hell not? I’ve not got a mortgage, I’ve not got kids, not got anyone to pay. So if it does go wrong, at least I’ll have tried it.’” Her final episodes had aired just a few weeks earlier. Then came “a group call from all three of my agents”, she recalls. “Whenever you get that, it either means you’ve been cancelled or you’ve got an amazing part.” Thankfully, it was the latter. “They said, ‘Can you keep a secret?’” Keeping quiet when she reunited with the Corrie gang the next day was “like torture”, she admits. “But even after a drink, I held it in.”
