Dan Starkey
Dan Starkey is an actor, born 1977.
The job of a prosthetic character actor is to go unrecognized in the street, and Dan Starkey has built a long career at it. He is an English actor best known for a long series of Sontaran appearances in Doctor Who, playing several different members of the same warrior clone species, and above all Strax, who crosses paths with the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi.
Strax is the interesting bit of casting. The Sontarans were designed as a military threat, and the joke of Strax is that the threat has been repurposed into domestic service with no ability to change register, so every household sentence arrives as a battlefield order. The gag only works because Starkey plays it completely straight from under a full mask, with the timing doing everything the face cannot.
Outside the show he has done more prosthetic and voice work, including Randal Moon in the CBBC fantasy series Wizards vs Aliens and voices in the animated feature Mummies. He joined the CBBC sketch show Class Dismissed in 2016 and appeared in 36 episodes before leaving after the third series. He also plays himself in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, a charity comedy about the business of having been in Doctor Who.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Dan Starkey
Go to Doctor Who: The Snowmen first. It is the Christmas special where Strax settles into the comic register the character kept afterwards, and it runs as a self-contained hour, so you need no accumulated context to enjoy it.
From there, Doctor Who itself is the main body of work, with the Strax appearances clustered around the Paternoster Gang stories, and Doctor Who: The Time of the Doctor puts him back under Sontaran prosthetics in a different capacity.
For the non-Sontaran side, Wizards vs Aliens is a genuinely decent CBBC fantasy series in which Randal Moon is a proper recurring role rather than a cameo, while Mummies is the family animation and the only title here that gives you the voice without the mask. The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is the deep cut, funny mainly to people who already know the show well.