Explosions weren’t a problem, nor were the guns, fire, multiple fights and a spell underwater – but dealing with cockroaches? The line was drawn. “That was the one stunt we weren’t allowed to do,” says Niamh Algar with a laugh, “because cockroaches are actually quite dangerous.” Plus, she says with a wry smile, you can’t train one not to bite. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say her character in the new Sky Atlantic show The Iris Affair has a run-in with a bug infestation – CGI it turns out, and fakes made by the props team – that makes her other encounters with corrupt police, internet sleuths and a potentially malevolent megaquantum computer seem tame.
Algar, most recently seen in the ITV thriller Playing Nice with James Norton earlier this year, plays Iris Nixon, a genius who is on the run having disappeared with a notebook that contains the encrypted activation sequence needed to “wake” a supercomputer. She stole it from Cameron Beck (a typically wonderful Tom Hollander), who has borrowed vast amounts of money so that in a brutalist bunker somewhere in the Italian mountains he can make the machine, named Charlie Big Potatoes – “well, he’s not small potatoes,” says Beck of the most powerful computer ever built. His life now depends on getting it going again.
It’s fast and fun, while also getting at the big existential questions about technology, consciousness, ethics and whether we’re all on a runaway train – right now, with AI – that will wipe out humanity. “I think if you were to look at a narrative like this 20 years ago you would be like, that’s so sci-fi,” says Algar. “I don’t think we realised how quickly technology was going to advance. The idea of building a computer and technology that is so advanced that it might have the capability to solve huge questions, like the cure for cancer? But then, does it also have the ability to wipe out the human race? It all depends on the hands controlling it, and it is a terrifying concept – and a very relevant question right now.” Iris, she says, “is very suspicious of the whole thing, and I think there’s reason for it.”
We don’t ever get to know much about Iris, only that she is superhumanly clever, supremely capable and physically strong (she also has a nice way with tailoring). Is it hard to play someone without any backstory? “No, I think it’s more interesting because sometimes you feel like you have to honour a backstory.” Though she did come up with a bit of her history, which she sent to Neil Cross, the writer (who also created Luther), just to give herself a foothold.
“She’s not like anyone I’ve got to play before,” she says, when we speak over Zoom, with Algar at home in London. “It was hugely enjoyable. And to play an enigmatic genius, it’s fascinating to get inside that.” Iris also doesn’t go in for emotion, but Algar defends her against suggestions she may be a psychopath. It’s more, she says, “like a coming-of-age story for someone who, as an adult, is trying to understand emotion and relationships later in life. I look at her almost like this computer. She looks at something, she copies it, she stores it.”
It’s a great role for Algar, whose first big breakthrough was as troubled young woman Dinah in Shane Meadows’s 2019 Channel 4 series The Virtues and who starred as a consultant doctor under incredible stress in ITV’s 2023 drama Malpractice. Both were tough and brave, but playing Iris, not someone wounded by trauma or particularly emotional was, says Algar with a small laugh, “really freeing”.
This summer, she worked on a film in Ireland, based on Anna McPartlin’s novel The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes, in which a dying woman is surrounded by family and friends. “It was a beautiful script,” says Algar, and it was also the first time she had worked on a production where there was a mental health adviser on set. Just as intimacy coordinators now routinely work on sets, to ensure comfort and safety in vulnerable scenes, the emotional toll of acting seems to be taken more seriously. Of course it’s acting but, says Algar, “you are exploring emotions and you can trigger something within you that you didn’t realise. You have to be mindful that you’re portraying the human condition and not take for granted that sometimes your body doesn’t know the difference.”
Algar grew up in Mullingar in Ireland, the youngest of five. There was an arts centre opposite her primary school and she remembers taking drama workshops there, and falling in love with acting. “It just brought me so much joy. It’s a sense of play that is, for me, hugely addictive. I think it’s escapism. You’re escaping into a different world, putting on someone else’s shoes for a moment.” She wasn’t from a family with connections to the arts – her father was a mechanic, her mother a nurse – but becoming an actor didn’t feel as if it was an impossibility. “I looked at it as a huge, exciting challenge,” she says. She moved to Dublin to study design, her parents encouraging her to think about a more stable job, while also taking acting classes, writing and performing in theatre roles; alongside that, she had worked as a runner and in the art department on film sets.
Having moved to London, it was her role in The Virtues, starring Stephen Graham, that allowed her to give up her pub and temping jobs to focus on auditions. Algar had grown up watching Meadows’s films. “He gave me a huge sense of ownership over character,” she says. “He instils an immense work ethic.” Was it intimidating to go on to a show such as that, so early in her career? Did she have self-doubt or imposter syndrome? “I think imposter syndrome is unavoidable, like, I didn’t train, I didn’t do the drama school way into acting.” When Algar first came to London, she says, she planned to say she had been to drama school in Ireland. “But it’s not like medicine,” she says with a laugh, “where you go, yes, you need eight years’ experience to do that.”
Surely, with the career she is building, she doesn’t feel like that now? “I don’t know if it’s ever going to go away,” she says. Algar remembers Julianne Moore, on Sky’s historical drama Mary & George – Algar played her lover – admitting to nerves before filming. “I was like, how are you nervous? You’ve got Academy awards, you’ve worked with some of the most established film-makers, it always looks effortless.” It’s that old quote, she points out, about the moment you think you know everything is the moment you stop learning. “So I think imposter syndrome has benefits to it. Every set is different. You always feel like you’re going back to school on every production, and I don’t think I’ve ever met an actor that’s not said they’ve been nervous.”
Is there added pressure when you’re the lead? It’s not that it doesn’t enter her head, she says, but “you take it week by week”. She was inspired by the actor Helen McCrory on the BBC drama MotherFatherSon. It was one of Algar’s first jobs and she had long admired McCrory; she was excited to have a big scene with her but it was cut, the news delivered by McCrory herself, who then stayed for a long chat, dispensing career advice. Most other lead actors, she says, wouldn’t have thought anything of allowing a runner to tell the unknown actor their scene had been cut. McCrory lobbied for a smaller scene to be shot. “I’ll never forget that, because that is the definition of a generous actor.”
So now, leading a production such as The Iris Affair, she says, “it’s being aware that you can set the tone.” She adds, “Tom [Hollander] is brilliant in that sense.” Presumably, their quantum computer co-star Charlie Big Potatoes was less good. The day before we speak, Algar saw the viral clips of Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated actor that has drawn condemnation from actors and performing arts unions. “I think as humans, we connect to each other on a very human level, and I don’t think you can ever replace that.” Then she adds with a laugh, “I try not to think about it too much.”
The Iris Affair starts on Thursday 16 October, Sky Atlantic, 9pm.
