10 Doctor Who Actors You Won't Recognise Out Of Costume

By Dan Butler /

9. Chipo Chung

Chan, how adorable was Chantho, tho?! This loveable Malmooth was introduced in Series 3's Utopia as Professor Yana's faithful assistant but she ultimately met a sticky end - to put it lightly - when her best friend was revealed to be a renegade Time Lord in human disguise and subsequently killed her (using, of all things, an electric cable) for trying to interfere with his plans to take over the world. Just to add further salt to the wound, she is sadly often overlooked in her own death scene (to be honest, though, Sir Derek Jacobi walking ominously towards the camera declaring "I... am... the... Master..." is slightly more memorable) but let's just take a moment to acknowledge how awesome Chantho actually was. Captain Jack Harkness even tried it on with her, and that's when you know you're special. Oh OK, he's like that with everyone, but she really was special, OK?! The end was only just the beginning for her real life alter ego, Chipo Chung, who returned to the Whoniverse in 2007's Turn Left as a mysterious fortune teller working on Shan Shen who offered Donna Noble a free psychic reading before subsequently destroying her entire world. Seriously. It's shocking how quickly that episode escalated. Chung is so unrecognisable in it, though, that you might not have even realised that you were actually looking at the same actress who'd left you feeling blue (come on, let us have that one!) exactly a year prior. Nobody really knows what happened to the fortune teller but if one of her two characters had to survive, it's Sod's law that it was that one. Poor Chantho. Why do bad things always have to happen to good people?! Damn you, Russell T Davies!