Doctor Who star John Simm is recovering from a shocking family discovery.
While appearing on the U.K. series DNA Journey, the British actor, 54, learned that his late father Ronald Simm was not his biological parent following a genetic test that showed it was actually a man named Terry Smith, according to U.K. newspaper The Telegraph.
“It spun my world, and everything I thought I knew, wasn’t real,” said Simm about the discovery in a statement sent to PEOPLE. “It’s turned out to be such a massive thing in my life.”
The Yorkshire-born actor joined the series with his Life on Mars costar Philip Glenister to delve deeply into their ancestral background — though he could never have predicted the revelation he would come across.
Adrian Rogers/ BBC/ Courtesy Everett Collection
Simm’s musician father Ronald died in 2015. On the show, the actor learned that his biological father Smith also passed away and that he lived in the same area of Manchester, England, per The Telegraph.
On the show, the actor shared that the revelations about his personal history also started before the show even started through a conversation he held with his mother before he took his DNA test.
“When they had me, in the sixties, they were both young…they were together and then they split up and were both with other people and then they got back together and then they had me,” he says in the show, per an ITV release. “I’d never heard this story before.”
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In a strange coincidence, Simm also discovered that he regularly performed onstage with his father Ronald in the same nightclubs that his biological father frequented.
“The thing that blows my mind, me and my dad, we played around here loads of times, we definitely played here a lot and he might have been in the same pub one night and watched me play,” Simm says in the show, per the ITV release.
“I can’t get it out of my head, because we played this area in the 80s and he was here and he was in working men’s clubs,” he adds. “It’s one of those mad, Back to the Future, Life On Mars things.”
The episode concludes with Simm meeting a half-sister he never knew he had as she shows him photographs and videos of his biological father.
DNA Journey airs in the U.K. on Oct.9
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