10 Actors With Multiple Roles In Doctor Who

This November, Doctor Who will officially turn 57 years old. It's practically unheard of for a TV show to run for that long - especially with one continuous canon - but somehow, the Doctor and the TARDIS have managed to pull it off.

One interesting side effect of the show's great age is that, over the years, there have been several instances where actors and actresses have been re-used, appearing in one story as one character, then popping up in a separate story as another.

From supporting characters and one-off villains to even some major players like Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan, if you've been consuming Doctor Who content for any number of years, you've likely pointed at the screen and gone "wait, that guy/gal was in that other episode too" more than once.

Since Doctor Who likes to feature British talent as much as possible, cases like this are somewhat inevitable - there are only so many suitable performers on our tiny little island, after all - and from the classic era to the more recent episodes, there are several actors who've double or even triple-dipped when it comes to appearing in the Doctor Who universe.

First Role: Adeola Oshodi (Army of Ghosts)

Second Role: Martha Jones (Smith and Jones - Last of the Time Lords)

While the other actors on this list all have over a dozen episodes separating their first and second Doctor Who appearances, Freema Agyeman does not.

In fact, after her first role as Torchwood employee Adeola Oshodi in Series 2's Army of Ghosts, she popped up again just three episodes later as a totally different character - the Tenth Doctor's companion for Series 3, Martha Jones.

Interestingly though, these two characters are actually linked. In Martha's first episode, she mentions that she had a cousin called Adeola who died at Canary Wharf. This connection wasn't planned though - it was just the writer's way of explaining why these different characters looked exactly the same.

After departing at the end of Series 3, Agyeman returned as Martha for a few episodes in Series 4, linking up with the Doctor and his allies in the blockbuster two-part finale.

Agyeman has also branched outside the main Doctor Who show too, reprising the role of Martha in a handful of episodes of spinoff series Torchwood.