Anjli Mohindra - Wikiwand

Anjli Mohindra (/ˈændʒli məˈhɪndrə/^[2]) is an English stage, screen and voice-over actress and writer. She is best known for her television roles as Rani Chandra in the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures (2008–2011) and would-be suicide bomber Nadia Ali in Bodyguard (2018). Her other television roles include Surgeon Lieutenant Tiffany Docherty in Vigil (2021), Detective Constable Josie Chancellor in Dark Heart (2016–2018) and Archie in The Lazarus Project (2022–2023).

Quick Facts Born, Alma mater ...

Anjli Mohindra
Anjli Mohindra photographed by David Reiss in 2023
Born	London, England
Alma mater	Central Junior Television Workshop
Occupations	Actress writer
Years active	2005–present
Television	The Sarah Jane Adventures Bodyguard
Partner	Sacha Dhawan^[1]

Early life

Mohindra was born in London to immigrant parents of Indian descent. She grew up in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire,^[3]^[4] apart from a four-year period on a military base in Germany, where she was the only ethnic minority child out of 2,000 students at an Armed Forces school.^[5] According to Mohindra, her family is Hindu Punjabi.^[6] Her father was raised in Kenya when it was a British colony and had a clerical job in the British Army for several years. Her mother was born in Punjab, India and arrived in the UK from India at the age of 18 to further her education, working variously as a court clerk, bank manager, postmistress, pub owner and English tutor.^[3]

Mohindra has a sister and a brother.^[7] In a 2018 interview about her personal style, Mohindra said that she had been a tomboy growing up, sometimes wearing her brother's hand-me-down clothes.^[8]

Mohindra attended Jesse Gray Primary School and West Bridgford School. She later trained in acting at the Central Junior Television Workshop in Nottingham.^[9]

Career

Summarize

Perspective

2005–2011: Early career

Mohindra's television acting career began in an episode of ITV's long-running soap opera Coronation Street in 2005, where she played Dev Alahan's daughter Shareen after being turned down for another, larger role.^[10] This appearance was soon followed by small, one-episode parts in the medical soap opera Doctors (2006), teen sitcom The Inbetweeners (2008), police procedural Law & Order: UK (2009) and medical drama Holby City (2010). She also appeared in two episodes of the comedy drama Beaver Falls (2011).

Mohindra played her first regular role as aspiring journalist Rani Chandra in the Doctor Who spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures (2008–2011) on children's television channel CBBC. She was introduced in the second series as a replacement for Yasmin Paige,^[11] who left the series to complete her GCSEs. Mohindra continued to play the role in the subsequent three series until the last episode of the show, broadcast in October 2011.

2012–present: Post-The Sarah Jane Adventures career

In 2012, Mohindra appeared in an episode of the longest-running medical drama series in the world, Casualty. Soon after, she landed parts in two episodes of The Missing (2014), a BAFTA and Golden Globe-nominated child-abduction thriller starring Tchéky Karyo, and six episodes of Cucumber (2015), Russell T Davies's series about a middle-aged gay man from Manchester.^[12]

Mohindra played a leading role in four 15-minute episodes of the BBC iPlayer romcom My Jihad (2014–2015),^[13]^[14] described as "a tender and funny love story exploring the unfolding relationship between a young Muslim couple".^[15] She then made her feature film debut in Miss You Already (2015), starring Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore, followed by supporting roles in two ITV shows, Paranoid (2016)^[16] and Bancroft (2017).^[17]^[18]

In 2018, Mohindra played Nadia Ali in Jed Mercurio's political thriller Bodyguard (2018).^[17] The series received multiple BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations; its finale was reported to be the most-watched BBC drama in 10 years.^[19] Mohindra initially declined the role until she learned there would be more depth to her character than she assumed.^[20] The same year, she starred alongside Tom Riley in the ITV crime drama Dark Heart and guested in DC's Legends of Tomorrow as magical shapeshifter Charlie. Mohindra starred as an ambitious radio producer in Mark Gatiss's take on the classic Christmas ghost story, The Dead Room (2018), alongside Simon Callow.^[17]^[21]

From 2006 to 2019, she played in 11 theatrical productions.^[22] Her stage work includes David Hare's Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2014)^[23] and Shahid Nadeem's Dara (2015), both professionally recorded and broadcast through National Theatre Live, as well as Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (2012)^[24] and Michael Frayn's Noises Off (2019).^[25]

In 2019, Mohindra appeared as a regular lead in the ITV drama Wild Bill.^[26] She later played the Queen of the Skithra^[27] in the Doctor Who episode "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror" (2020).^[28] Since 2022, Mohindra has also reprised her role of Rani from The Sarah Jane Adventures in several Doctor Who audio drama spin-offs from Big Finish Productions, as well as in three episodes of Doctor Who: Redacted (2022), a ten-part podcast drama from BBC Sounds featuring the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.^[29] Mohindra has played other characters in audio dramas featuring the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Doctors over the years.^[30]^[31]^[32]

Mohindra won a place on the Royal Court's Young Writers' Programme in 2016.^[17] During COVID-19 pandemic, she made her writing debut with a short film called The People Under the Moon (2020), produced entirely during lockdown and starring Gwilym Lee as a medic who joins a dating app.^[33]

In 2021, she appeared alongside Suranne Jones in Tom Edge's Vigil, playing Tiffany Docherty, the medical officer on board a nuclear submarine which becomes the subject of a murder investigation. The series quickly became the BBC's most-watched new drama of the year.^[34] The following year, she appeared in the Netflix period spy thriller Munich – The Edge of War as a British diplomatic secretary embroiled in the negotiations at the 1938 Munich conference^[35] and then had the lead role in the Sky science fiction drama The Lazarus Project, described as a "gripping exploration of memory, fate and the limits of love".^[36] In the series she played Archie, who recruits Paapa Essiedu's character George into a secret organisation that has the power to turn back time if the world is threatened by extinction.^[37]