Niamh Algar on growing up with Channel 4, having Stephen Graham as a mentor and her new thriller Suspect

If there’s a word that quickly sums up the roles that Niamh Algar has taken on since her breakout turn in Shane Meadows drama The Virtues, it’s surely ‘intense.’

Whether the Irish actress, 29, is playing an undercover detective under severe psychological pressure in true crime drama Deceit, a film classifier drawn in by video nasties in indie horror Censor or, as in her new TV series Suspect, a woman grieving her partner’s unexplained death, she brings a blazing energy to the screen that’s impossible to look away from - and, you imagine, impossible to phone in.

“When there’s an emotional threat for the character, or a physical threat, I have to feel it… I have to really care,” she says. “I know from the outside, they look incredibly harrowing emotionally, but those [roles] are always the most rewarding.” Algar is speaking over Zoom from Spain, where she has been filming the upcoming Disney+ heist series Culprits - re: the intensity thing, she’s playing a character called ‘Psycho’ - and trying and failing to dodge sunburn (“I was literally outside for five minutes without any sun cream on and managed to get sunburned,” she laughs. “My Irish skin is not cut out for this”).

A crime thriller based on a Danish series, Suspect feels like a worthy showcase for Algar. In each episode, James Nesbitt’s Danny, a police officer, goes head to head with someone from his estranged daughter’s past, attempting to piece together the circumstances of her death. This highly charged, two hander set-up means “there’s nothing really to hide behind” for the actors, Algar explains.

“You’re not cutting to another narrative - you’re with these people in this room for half an hour, and there’s something very intimate about doing storytelling that way.” The fraught conversation between her character, Nicola, and Nesbitt’s Danny plays out like “a game of cat and mouse… You can’t pull away from the moment, there’s no kind of respite.”

The series will air on Channel 4, and if there’s another common denominator in Algar’s career to date, it’s the broadcaster (along with The Virtues and Deceit, she’s also appeared in Pure and The Bisexual for the channel) and its production arm Film4 (which backed both Censor and Calm With Horses, the film that earned her a first Bafta nomination in 2021).

As a teenager in Mullingar, County Westmeath (“really, really in the countryside”) she “grew up on a diet of Channel 4 - This Is England, Misfits, Skins” and praises the “honesty” of its storytelling. “[These were] hard-hitting dramas that were never afraid to shy away from the truth,” she says. “There’s no glossy film over what Film4, Channel 4, put out there… I love the stories that they tell and I love the people who they work with - they’re brave in who they are.” They are, she adds, a “great home” for rising young talent too - and listening to her enthusiasm, it’s hard not to think about what stands to be lost as C4 faces privatisation. Nadine Dorries, take note.

Growing up, Algar was “very much always living in my head, living in my imagination - I could just get lost in these stories. My mum would just see me in the corner, talking to my teddy bears and they all had different roles. I was very much able to entertain myself, maybe because I was the youngest of five.” She might have been a day-dreamy kid, but speaking to her now, there’s a real sense of resourcefulness and determination.

“No one in my family’s in the arts,” she says, so she had little idea about routes into the industry, but “when I wanted to start acting and I couldn’t afford to [go to] drama school, I started working on film sets, because I thought I’d just go straight to the source.” She started working as a production runner in Dublin, “getting coffee for people on set, to try and watch and see what everyone does”, and, as she was studying art at the time, “talked my way into a role as a prop buyer.” After volunteering to run lines with the actors she was working alongside, she was asked to appear in a scene.

She still tries to be like a sponge on set - “I’ve never stopped learning, I think you have to continuously be open to change” - and while filming the second series of Raised by Wolves, HBO Max’s sci-fi drama exec-produced by Ridley Scott, she spent a few days shadowing her director to get to grips with “the outer workings of how everything is being put together” (she’d “love to direct” in the future - “hopefully a few skills have rubbed off…”).

One lesson that has stayed with Algar came from her The Virtues co-star and “role model” Stephen Graham, “who’s been so supportive over the last couple of years, and who’s always there for me if I need advice… What I learned when I worked on that project is that to make something look like it’s completely off the cuff and natural and truthful comes from hours of hard work, knowing the story that you’re telling and knowing your character… For me to have that as my first job, to be working alongside [Graham], I couldn’t have asked for a better start in this industry. He just carries kindness everywhere with him.”

She had a chance to reunite with him at the TV Baftas last month, when she was up for Best Actress for her performance in Deceit. She eventually lost out to Jodie Comer, but Algar notes that the scope of roles recognised in her category marks a sharp contrast to the kind of parts she’d read in the early days of her career. “When I was starting out, I was seeing these amazing stories but they were always told from the male perspective or with a male focus,” she says. “And now we’re seeing women at the forefront of these incredibly interesting stories, so layered and textured.”

Her list of upcoming projects paints a similar picture. As well as Culprits, she’s starring alongside Florence Pugh in The Wonder (“I’m just in awe of the fact that I get to work with Florence”). It’s set during the Irish famine, “a period in Irish history that I don’t believe has really been portrayed on screen”. Then there’s the medical thriller Malpractice, in which she’ll play a doctor facing a negligence enquiry, starring alongside partner Lorne MacFadyen (who you might recognise as the rogue Russian agent causing chaos in Vigil). “It’s a really exciting time” for the industry, she says. “Long may it continue.”

Suspect starts on Sunday June 19, 9pm, on Channel 4 and All 4