When the Irish actress Niamh Algar announced herself to the British TV viewing public she did so with a thump. A literal thump, in the face of Stephen Graham’s troubled protagonist Joseph in the acclaimed drama The Virtues. She has meant business ever since.
Her character in Shane Meadows and Jack Thorne’s series was Dinah, who — spoiler alert, if you didn’t watch the show — ended up murdering her mother for denying her access to the son she was forced to give away for adoption. Algar’s own mother watched the show and jokingly asked whether her daughter was ever going to appear in a romantic comedy.
“I think I’ve put my mother through hell, bless her. On screen I’ve died … how many times? I’ve died twice where my neck was slit — in Mary and George, a series with Julianne Moore last year [Algar played the sex worker Sandie], and in a Disney show called Culprits.”
Now 32, Algar’s latest role as the restaurateur Maddie in ITV1’s Playing Nice, an adaptation of the thriller by JP Delaney, involves more torment and unhappiness from the opening scene. In a flash forward, Maddie’s husband, Pete (James Norton), a journalist, runs frantically towards the Cornish sea where their child’s yellow mackintosh is floating.
The action then flashes back to the family’s seemingly idyllic life of beach swims and home baking, but it is soon upended by one of those bombshells that always seems to happen in ITV dramas: the primary school-aged son they left hospital with a few years ago is not theirs and their biological child has been taken home by another couple. The two families meet up after this mistake is discovered and at first all is rosy until things turn decidedly sour.
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It’s a gripping watch, aided by excellent performances, especially from Algar and Norton, who are the less moneyed of the two couples and who play being on the back foot with great subtlety. Behind the accommodating smiles and politeness much of the drama relies on almost imperceptible glances and a sense of underlying tensions that perfectly suit Algar’s quicksilver acting style.
There is, however, a terribly sad coda to her latest project. While she was filming Playing Nice her beloved elder sister Lynne was seriously ill. She died in March last year. It is a difficult thing for Algar to talk about, and at first she worries that she will “become a sad story”. Lynne was a high-performance coach and physio who worked for Triathlon Ireland and the University of Limerick.
“She was an incredibly talented athlete and I just wanted to be her. I wanted to follow in her footsteps,” Algar says. “From a young age [she] used to get me up in the morning before school and we’d go for a run.”
She was similarly motivating during the filming of Playing Nice. “I remember her saying to me when I was at home, ‘What the heck are you doing here? Go back to work!’ And I think you take all of the amazing things a person teaches you and remind yourself of the gifts that they give you growing up.”
The youngest of five children born to Angela and David, Algar grew up in a house in a wood in the middle of the countryside near Mullingar, 50 miles west of Dublin. She had a horse, which she named Maximus after Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator. At school she threw herself into sport and after-school activities including musical theatre, which made her realise she didn’t want to do anything other than act. (She did embark on a course in architectural design but only because her parents said that she needed a trade that could offer guaranteed money.)
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After Lynne died Algar spent six months filming Iris, a Sky thriller written by Neil Cross in which she plays a maths whizz who steals crucial code from Tom Hollander’s philanthropist and goes on the run. No one can pretend it took away any of the rawness: how hard was it to film?
• James Norton’s most harrowing role: ‘I was a mess, having panic attacks’
“Grief is … not something that you can ever prepare for,” she says. “So I think acting is an escapism in the most wonderful ways. There’s no formula to it. Everyone’s going to grieve differently and you essentially grow around it.
“Something that I find so brilliant about acting is that you’re forced to be incredibly present in what you are doing, saying and looking at — which we don’t often do in real life; we’re listening to a podcast walking down the street. I love studying people in the street and watching people or watching documentaries [for that reason]. Real people are fascinating.”
She wants to set up a charity in Lynn’s name and is thinking of getting a tattoo of her signature on her arm. She wasn’t a tattoo person before, she says, but she is now. Bereavement will mark her in a literal sense.
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She has no children and lives with her boyfriend, the Scottish actor Lorne MacFadyen, in Hackney, east London. She was able to tap into the role of a mother like Maddie because she has nieces and nephews. We talk about so-called authentic casting, the idea that you have to share key characteristics of a character to play a role — and the added complication that Maddie appears to have experienced postnatal depression. “Well, that’s like saying that only if you’ve been in a car accident can you play someone dealing with trauma. [Acting is] pretending for a living.”
It’s hard to disagree with that, but is there something about shows like Playing Nice that play a little too readily on parental terrors? I tell her that someone I know refuses to watch dramas if there is the remotest possibility of a child suffering in them. She certainly understands that sentiment.
“I think any parent who is going to watch this is going to be terrified. It is a terrible concept, to bring home the wrong kid.” Is it exploitative? “That’s television. That’s drama. I think you take drama and you take the concept that anyone could be in this situation. That’s the idea. That you as a viewer want to be able to sit and put yourself in that position, but see someone else play it out. I think that’s what we all do. As a kid you’re looking at superheroes. You’re putting the cape on.”
She likes living in London, but “I miss how friendly and approachable Irish people are,” she says. “London is a city that is constantly moving, so someone’s always going somewhere. There’s an impatience in London. It’s a city run on coffee, really.”
Still, life here, she admits, probably suits her. “I don’t really sit still,” she says. She does boxing training three times a week and, whenever she can, goes cold water swimming in a reservoir not far from her home. She also threw herself into the surfing and swimming scenes while filming Playing Nice.
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“Every morning before filming I would jump in the sea. And during filming I kept wanting to go do it again and again. And they were like, ‘Niamh you’ve gone blue — we need to get you out and put some blankets on.’”
It’s clearly been a difficult time for her, but something tells me that, in time, Algar will be fighting fit.
Playing Nice begins on ITV1 on Jan 5 at 9pm
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