Doctor Who has a long legendary history of stars—from Julian Glover to Carey Mulligan—showing up in the series priorto they went on to takeoff into worldwide fame, and Doctor Who as a genuine who’s who (sorry) of popular stars priorto they actually began shining is a principle as old as the program itself. But now, 15 years on, we’re looking back at one unexpected visitor star in specific.
Fifteen years ago today, Doctor Who’s 3rd restored season saw the broadcast of “Daleks in Manhattan,” the veryfirst in a bonkers two-part experience that saw David Tennant and Freema Agyeman’s 10th Doctor and Martha Jones travel back to ‘30s New York and reveal a ominous plot by a cult of Daleks—survivors of their appearing 23,057,929,365th time of being cleaned out permanently for truly real this time at the end of the prior season—to keep their race alive through weird hereditary adjustment to produce hybrids of human and Dalek DNA.
It’s an absolutely absurd story. The Daleks are sneaking around in New York’s sewagesystems, and likewise kidnapping random individuals, turning them into Pigmen for definitely no factor at all other than “hey we required some henchmen since there’s 4 of us and our hands are a plunger and a killer raygun shaped like a blend,” and ultimately one of the Daleks is changed into this humanoid, walking Cthulhu-esque animal in a sleek match and spats:
There’s an unscripted dance number. The climax includes the extremely top of an in-construction Empire State Building, and the Doctor getting electrocuted to sabotage the Dalek’s gene-splicing experiments. Hugh Quarshie—not the surprise popular visitor star of the episode in hindsight, although you may finest understand him as The Phantom Menace’s Captain Panaka—plays a hobo. And, since it’s Doctor Who and you can’t simply cannot get enough real American individuals to play Americans, quite much the whole visitor cast is individuals putting on some, diplomatically speaking… exaggerated accents. Including one such accent wielder in specific: then obscure star Andrew Garfield.
At this point in his profession, Garfield was still five years away from endingupbeing the next cinematic Spider-Man after Tobey Maguire, and was months from making his American movie launching in Lions for Lambs. Doctor Who was another TELEVISION function in a sea of British TELEVISION functions, and priorto he’d shoot to the excessive heights of his existing profession. No Social Network, no Never Let Me Go, and definitely no lying his trousers off about revealing up in Spider-Man: No Way Home . Just a young, fresh-faced Garfield as Frank, a Tennessee transplant who chose up and moved to New York to discover work to assistance assistance his household. One of the individuals sleeping rough in a homeless camp in Central Park pestered with mystical disappearances (which was, it turns out, the Daleks catching individuals to turn into Pigmen), Garfield’s Frank is the wide-eyed innocent foil to the skilled Doctor and Martha, blended up for experience and even falling a teeny-tiny-little bit in love with the latter.
But he likewise has the broadest, strangest rootin’-tootin’ accent you ever did hear on an episode of Doctor Who. Garfield—who is a double British/American person—has gone on to play numerous American characters in his smashhit profession, so it’s not like we understand he can’t do one these days. His Peter Parker sounds Perfectly Passable! But going back to see his moreyouthful self simply entirely vocally all over the location as Frank is both strangely charming and humorous all these years lateron. It’s not every day you get to keepinmind that time the Amazing Spider-Man assisted the Doctor beat up some Daleks, however today’s the day to do so… and then possibly rapidly forget simply how he sounded while doing it.
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