It’s Been 15 Years Since Doctor Who Made Andrew Garfield Fight Daleks With a Questionable Accent

Doctor Who has a protracted fabled historical past of actors—from Julian Glover to Carey Mulligan—displaying up within the sequence earlier than they went on to blow up into worldwide stardom, and Doctor Who as a veritable who’s who (sorry) of well-known stars earlier than they actually began shining is an idea as outdated because the present itself. But now, 15 years on, we’re wanting again at one shocking visitor star particularly.

Fifteen years in the past right now, Doctor Who’s third revived season noticed the printed of “Daleks in Manhattan,” the primary in a bonkers two-half escapade that noticed David Tennant and Freema Agyeman’s tenth Doctor and Martha Jones journey again to ‘30s New York and uncover a sinister plot by a cult of Daleks—survivors of their seeming 23,057,929,365th time of being wiped out forever for really real this time at the end of the prior season—to keep their race alive through creepy genetic manipulation to create hybrids of human and Dalek DNA.

It’s an completely absurd story. The Daleks are creeping round in New York’s sewers, and likewise kidnapping random individuals, turning them into Pigmen for completely no purpose in any respect apart from “hey we needed some henchmen because there’s four of us and our hands are a plunger and a killer raygun shaped like a whisk,” and ultimately one of many Daleks is remodeled into this humanoid, strolling Cthulhu-esque creature in a spiffy swimsuit and spats:

There’s an impromptu dance quantity. The climax entails the very high of an in-construction Empire State Building, and the Doctor getting electrocuted to sabotage the Dalek’s gene-splicing experiments. Hugh Quarshie—not the shock well-known visitor star of the episode in hindsight, though you would possibly greatest know him as The Phantom Menace’s Captain Panaka—performs a hobo. And, as a result of it’s Doctor Who and you may’t simply can’t get sufficient precise American individuals to play Americans, just about the whole visitor solid is individuals placing on some, diplomatically talking… exaggerated accents. Including one such accent wielder particularly: then little-known actor Andrew Garfield.

At this level in his profession, Garfield was nonetheless 5 years away from changing into the subsequent cinematic Spider-Man after Tobey Maguire, and was months from making his American movie debut in Lions for Lambs. Doctor Who was one other TV position in a sea of British TV roles, and earlier than he’d shoot to the dizzying heights of his present profession. No Social Network, no Never Let Me Go, and definitely no mendacity his pants off about displaying up in Spider-Man: No Way Home but. Just a younger, fresh-faced Garfield as Frank, a Tennessee transplant who picked up and moved to New York to seek out work to assist help his household. One of the individuals sleeping tough in a homeless camp in Central Park plagued with mysterious disappearances (which was, it seems, the Daleks capturing individuals to show into Pigmen), Garfield’s Frank is the wide-eyed harmless foil to the seasoned Doctor and Martha, whisked up for journey and even falling a teeny-tiny-little bit in love with the latter.

But he additionally has the broadest, strangest rootin’-tootin’ accent you ever did hear on an episode of Doctor Who. Garfield—who’s a twin British/American citizen—has gone on to play many American characters in his blockbuster profession, so it’s not like we all know he can’t do one as of late. His Peter Parker sounds Perfectly Passable! But going again to see his youthful self simply fully vocally far and wide as Frank is each weirdly endearing and hilarious all these years later. It’s not each day you get to keep in mind that time the Amazing Spider-Man helped the Doctor beat up some Daleks, however right now’s the day to take action… after which perhaps shortly overlook simply how he sounded whereas doing it.

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