Stomping around in bulky retro-style robot suits filming the opening episode of “Doctor Who” Season 2 might have seemed like fun, but for professional creature artists Stephen Love and Rob Strange it can be quite hazardous… especially if you topple over!
“When you fell, you just had to surrender to it and wait until you stopped rolling around,” Strange reveals. “It felt very safe, but it looked pretty dramatic.”
Love and Strange are the main puppeteer actors inside the old-fashioned android costumes for “The Robot Revolution,” which kicked off Ncuti Gatwa’s sophomore season as The 15th Doctor on April 12. That debut story finds the Time Lord’s new companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu), abducted and whisked off to a planet called Miss Belinda Chandra. The alien race and its bulky enforcer robots believe her to be their ruler when its star was named after her as a romantic gift years ago.
Performing as Robot 1 & 2, Love and Strange form a brilliant tandem act nicknamed Team Strangelove. They first worked together back in 2022 as the Wrarth Warriors opposite David Tennant for the 60th Anniversary Special, “The Star Beast.”
“It was such a blast to work together again for the Robots, this time with the fabulous Ncuti and Varada,” Love tells Space.com. “The robots are such glorious, retro-futuristic designs from Millennium FX and were one of the most intense suits we’ve ever worn, but ingeniously engineered, and worth the ordeal for how fabulous they look on screen.
“Height and body size is really vital. For the very first ‘Doctor Who’ episode that we did, Rob had already been cast in it, and they needed another person identical to Rob. So I owe the start of my creature journey to this other man here because we are almost identical in height and size. When they were recasting for the robot gig, they knew it has to be Steve and Rob.”
Millennium FX is the award-winning creature effects workshop that creates all of “Doctor Who’s” monsters, beasts, ghosts, aliens, and androids, and here they conceived the intimidating robots wielding oversized ray guns as something straight out of a classic 1950s sci-fi B-movie.
Each ultra-cool robot suit was 3D-printed then outfitted with fiberglass in certain places on the torso, arms, and legs. The insides contained lightweight metal and bits of wood, but their makeup was primarily 3D printing and fiberglass, and very difficult to view out of when acting.
“No, we couldn’t see a lot,” explains Strange. “The robots have their little robot face, and I guess they designed little air vents like grills that we could sort of see out of. So when you moved, you had to get your bearings as you moved, but when you were close to something, you couldn’t really see it at all. We did a lot of work with Paul Casey, who’s a ‘Doctor Who’ veteran. Ten or twenty years ago, he played loads of creatures in previous seasons of ‘Doctor Who’, and he’s back on as the creature movement choreographer and director.
“He worked with us to do all the movement, he trained us up, he gets us moving in synch, and gets us walking like robots. We’d have an earpiece and he’d just direct us and be our eyes and ears basically, because you didn’t hear much in the suits since they were so echoey. He’d guide us and be in constant communication, telling us to start moving or stop moving.”
Regarding any behind-the-scenes pranks or funny anecdotes while they were inside the behemoth robot suits, Love and Strange recalled a couple of embarrassing instances.
“On one of the behind-the-scenes episodes, they did show one clip of me falling over,” Love admits. “It was on one of the robot suit test days. At the time, the feet of the robot had been designed in a different way, which meant that there was a slightly loose section of the foot. When we were walking, that section was able to curl around underneath itself, and that happened and sent me tumbling. The robots were fixed and altered by Millennium. On the actual shoot, I was the one who fell over the least. I think we should get this really clear.”
Fellow creature artists Charles Stamford and Lucas Edwards also had robot cameos as Robots 3 & 4. And as Love points out, he clearly wasn’t the only one who took an unfortunate spill during the long production days of “The Robot Revolution.”
“I inevitably took some tumbles,” Strange adds. “I didn’t even have the excuse of the toes that were designed differently. I just fell, and we took some quite spectacular tumbles. The way it was rigged is we were kind of strapped in with a harness within the suit. The robot was like a shell around us, so we were really protected. The Millennium team really looked after us.”
“Doctor Who” Season 2 airs exclusively on Disney+ and BBC with new weekly episodes each Saturday. This latest episode, “The Well” just went live, and it’s actually a sequel to a classic David Tennant Who episode.
