A Fan Favorite and a New Face are Confirmed for 'Doctor Who' Season 14
Jemma Redgrave and Aneurin Barnard join "Doctor Who"
(Photo: BBC)
With filming underway on the first full Doctor Who season featuring Ncuti Gatwa's new Doctor, we're finally getting our first details about what this next era of the popular sci-fi franchise will be like. While we're unlikely to know for some time exactly how we'll be referring to Gatwa's Doctor (Fourteen? Fifteen?) due to the mystery of David Tennant's return for the series' sixtieth anniversary, we do know quite a bit about what will happen after the torch is passed.
We've met Mille Gibson's new companion Ruby Sunday, seen the costumes that Ruby and the Doctor will be running around the universe in, and learned that festive specials are back on the menu for the foreseeable future. (We stan a man who loves Christmas, Russell T. Davies!) Dylan Holmes Williams, who has directed episodes of M. Night Shyamalan's Apple TV+ series Servant, is helming Season 14's inaugural episode. And we're all assuming that Tennant will somehow turn into Gatwa by the end of the anniversary episodes.
The BBC also announced a few new tidbits this week, revealing that fan favorite Jemma Redgrave will be reprising her role as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, daughter of the Brigadier and head of UNIT. Since the long-running organization set on defending the Earth often played a key role in stories during Davies' previous turn as showrunner (and basically gave rise to the Torchwood spin-off, it's not terribly surprising that we'll be seeing them again in Season 14. (And hopefully, Kate will have a more substantial story than she did in Doctor Who: Flux and Jodie Whittaker farewell special "The Power of the Doctor".
🚨 Cast announcements 🚨
— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) January 9, 2023
UNIT returns! Jemma Redgrave returns as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and UNIT, the long-running organisation set on defending the Earth, returns in the next series of #DoctorWho.
Aneurin Barnard also joins the series as the mysterious Roger ap Gwilliam. pic.twitter.com/OkDsuC2ZMh
Aneurin Barnard, most recently seen in Netflix's 1899 but likely familiar to Anglophiles from his turn as King Richard III in Starz period drama The White Queen, has also been added to the cast for Season 14. Details on his character are scant at the moment, but he'll be playing a mysterious man named mysterious Roger ap Gwilliam.
The BBC offered no details about who Gwilliam is or what his role will be on the show. But between the timing of this casting announcement and the vaguely villainous air of the photo released along with it, one pretty much has to assume that Roger will be involved in a story with UNIT in some way. But will he be a friend or a threat?
We'll have to wait some time to fine out, as Season 14 of Doctor Who won't reach our screens until some point in 2024. In the meantime, we're all counting down the days until the arrival of the three 60th anniversary specials next year, in which former Doctor Tennant will be reunited with former companion Catherine Tate, along with Bernard Cribbins, Neil Patrick Harris and Yasmin Finney.
