An Avengers: Doomsday Star Joins Doctor Who This Week in the Weirdest Way

Alan Cumming is set to reprise his role as Nightcrawler from the X-Men movies in the upcoming Marvel Studios movie Avengers: Doomsday. Before that, he’s making another return to a major sci-fi universe with a guest role in this week’s episode of Doctor Who, albeit as a different character and via somewhat unconventional means. Cumming previous played King James I in the 2018 Doctor Who episode “The Witchfinders.” Where Cumming’s first Doctor Who role was rooted in real history, his character in this week’s episode, “Lux,” couldn’t be further from it. Cumming provides the voice of the living cartoon called Mr. Ring-A-Ding, and Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies that getting Cumming to commit to the role was no challenge at all.

“He’s Alan Cumming! He just went, ‘You want me to be a murderous cartoon?’ Plus, you don’t have to come to Cardiff; it’s all voice work; that’s also very helpful,” Davies says. “But he properly loves the show. He did, I think, three sessions for us. It was fascinating, the animation. None of us had done animation before. We had to be taught how to do it by the animators, which is lay down his voice track, first of all, and then once it’s 90% animated, lay down his proper voice track, and then a final session just for humps and bumps and little rewrites that there might be. And it was wonderful. He loved it. He had such a good time.”

Davies continued, “When our casting director, Andy Pryor, suggested him, it was just an instant ‘yes.’ What a lovely man. He did his voices in New York, though. I never got to meet him; our producer went over, so I still haven’t gotten to meet him. One day, I swear.”

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Doctor Who Stars Acted Against Alan Cumming’s Voice

While Cumming only had to provide Mr. Ring-a-Ding’s voice, Doctor Who stars Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu had to act agains the towering cartoon as their flesh-and-blood characters, the Doctor and companion Belinda Chandra (though one Doctor Who Season 2 trailer did show that both character get animated at some point during the story). The actors tell ComicBook that Cumming’s performance elevated the experience.

“You do kind of get used to acting opposite a tennis ball after a while,” says Gatwa, who is in his second season as the Fifteenth Doctor. “You get very used to being terrified of the tennis ball, but with ‘Lux,’ there was a three-foot cardboard cutout of Mr. Ring-a-Ding, which was very fun to work opposite. But Alan Cumming’s voice performance in the season was incredible. It brought the cardboard to life, which was like, ‘How do you do that?’ What a performance. It’s just incredible.”

Sethu chimed in to say, “In between takes you might flick his nose or ssomething and have fun, but when they play the sound and Alan Cumming’s voice fills the whole set…” Gatwa finishes, “You’re scared. You’re scared of that three-foot cutout. You’re scared. So it was fun. What an honor we got to act opposite Alan Cumming’s voice.”

New Doctor Who episodes debut Saturdays on Disney+.