Niamh Algar is denouncing double standards

“I get bored very quickly,” says Niamh Algar. The Irish actor bobs from side to side as she talks, revealing a sword mounted on the wall of her East London residence. She notices me peering at it. “It’s great for opening packages,” she laughs. Immediately, the thirty-three-year-old snaps back into her original train of thought, talking with frenetic pace and flurried hand gestures. “I can just think really clearly when loads of stuff is happening at one time,” she says. “The more distractions, the quieter my mind is. When it’s uber quiet, I’m like, Something’s wrong.” She chuckles, clutching her chest for dramatic effect. “I’m terrible at meditating.” According to the actor, this ‘calm in the chaos’ streak (which she partly attributes to her Order of Malta days, an Irish version of the Red Cross that she volunteered with as a child) makes her level-headed in emergencies and adept at juggling commitments. In 2022, she was fresh off another job and only had a week to prepare for the role of A&E doctor Lucinda Edwards in Malpractice. She threw herself into questioning as many doctors as she could in the time she had. Interestingly enough, Algar believes everyone is secretly skilled at multitasking. We must run in different circles, I think to myself.

Instead, the actor likens Nixon to James Bond. In the heat of the chase across Italy which propels the series, the puzzle-cracker remains cool headed — she simply doesn’t have time to dwell on her feelings. “You don’t see [Bond] sitting there going, God, why? If only my father loved me! What she’s doing and what she’s aiming for is way more interesting.” Algar’s soft Irish accent, which she’s admitted to toning down for Brits, grows a little stronger. “Those characters are always played by men,” Algar continues, eyebrows knitted together. “The men can always play the reserved, logical, has a ten-mile stare, kind of, Cool Hand Luke. And then they’ll cut to the woman and go, This is how he should be feeling. They can afford to not always play the emotional card so readily.”

Algar’s experience of those double standards extends beyond the screen. During press tours, the actor has fielded countless questions about male directors and co-stars. “Him, him, him,” she repeats in exasperation. “No one ever asks me about the women I’ve worked with. There are a lot of women doing amazing work, but I don’t know if they’re getting the support and attention.” She calls out media outlets for overlooking women’s projects. “It’s always very male focused,” she says. “Conversation needs to shift so we’re equally represented.” It comes as no surprise, then, that Algar was keen to take
on this part in The Iris Affair. “I think women are all prepared to do this role because we see this character being portrayed by men all the time on screen,” she observes. To make that archetype her own, Algar read articles about child prodigies, like the young Nixon, in theoretical science and maths, trying to understand how they speak and present themselves — what motivates them. And, while refining her character’s inner world with the show’s writer Neil Cross, she decided that Nixon’s hero is physicist Albert Einstein.

Because of her extraordinary intelligence, in the show, Nixon has been hired to awaken a supercomputer by unlocking a set of complex codes. In light of this theme of technology, the conversation turns to AI. Algar seems to share her character’s stance on the topic. “AI is brilliant, but only in the right hands,” she cautions. “That’s what I took from her. Don’t be afraid to question it. Go with your gut.” But that wasn’t all Algar learnt from the role. “There are parts of me that are like, I wish I was like Iris,” she says. “She reminds me of a dog. When bad things happen, she shakes it off. She very much lives in the moment, in a very practical sense.”

Algar, then, discovered her own resilience alongside Nixon’s. It’s this that helped her manage the “huge mental and physical demands” of filming — from practising fight sequences to learning long speeches about quantum technology. Overall, though, she derived great enjoyment from the whole process. While she may not have spent much time with Hollander on screen, she recalls how the pair explored local areas with the rest of the cast. Feasting on cheese and wine in the Alps and taking post-wrap trips to the beach in Sardinia created a holiday feeling. “That was lovely,” Algar says warmly. “We actually had time to hang out, get to know each other more and have fun. Every day was an adventure. It never felt like work.”