Niamh Algar: ‘I’m well able to look after myself’

The Virtues star talks to Ellie Harrison about her ‘wild' upbringing, why she loves playing the underdog, and her new film Calm With Horses

Niamh Algar: ‘I always want to make sure I don’t misrepresent women on screen’ (Getty)

Niamh Algar is a fighter. She punched Stephen Graham’s plastered protagonist out cold in The Virtues, has sparred with Ridley Scott in the boxing gym, and is forever rallying against staid representations of women on screen.

But the 27-year-old Irish actor hasn’t always been so scrappy. “I got into boxing after I was attacked in a park,” she says. As a teen, she was beaten up by a group of schoolgirls. “I didn’t really fight back because I didn’t know how to. It wasn’t funny at the time but I laugh about it now. I ended up with a black eye and a bust lip. My friend pegged it off. I was raging with her.”

We’re in a central London hotel to discuss Algar’s latest role in Calm With Horses, and as she speaks she plays endlessly with the arm of the sofa, swinging off it in her seat. Onscreen, Algar’s sported some unusual hairstyles – a half-shaved head in the intense TV dramas Pure, MotherFatherSon and The Virtues, and a mullet in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming sci-fi series Raised by Wolves – but today, her bleach-blonde hair is smartly cropped and blow-dried.

After that park attack, Algar’s mother sent her to self-defence classes, because she didn’t want her daughter “to go around scared” for the rest of her life. “I’m not violent,” Algar grins, “I’m just well able to look after myself.”

In Calm With Horses, though, Elgar is an antidote to violence. A brutal, unflinching debut from filmmaker Nick Rowland, the film stars Cosmo Jarvis as Douglas “Arm” Armstrong. A former boxer, he becomes an enforcer – essentially an attack dog – for drug-dealing family the Devers in the west of Ireland. Algar plays Ursula, the mother of Arm’s severely autistic child and just about the only voice of reason in the film. Her mission is to give her son Jack a better life.

“I knew exactly who Ursula was and how to play her,” says Algar, “but I also played against what she might have been portrayed as – as this whiny b**** who is trying to take her son away from his father. I never looked at it that way. I always want to make sure I don’t misrepresent women on screen and that my characters are not defined by the men in the story. Ursula’s got her own thing going on. She is her own woman and that’s so important. I never want to read a character description that says, ‘She is the girlfriend of…’”

Niamh Algar and Cosmo Jarvis in 'Calm With Horses'

Calm With Horses is set in a beautiful, rural town in the west of Ireland, so isolated that its inhabitants feel trapped and suffocated. Algar relates to that. “I grew up in a place called Mullingar,” she says, “very much surrounded by farmland. I understand that feeling of everyone knowing your business and watching you. Everyone knows your family, what your dad’s trade is and people have a preconceived idea about who you are.”

She moved to London in 2017. “Then I was myself. I don’t look at it as reinventing myself, it’s more that I can say, ‘I’m just me, no one knows my family’.”

Algar’s decision to become an actor “baffled” some people in her local community. The youngest of five children, she had been an “odd child, literally in my own little world” – but not many could imagine a girl from Mullingar becoming a performer. “There was no template for it,” she says. “I wasn’t being compared to anyone else, so that was really freeing. But you can’t convince people of the dream you have in your head if they can’t see it. This was frustrating, but also empowering because I was trying to break the mould.”

Algar worked hard to make her dream a reality, putting in hours of research for each role. For MotherFatherSon, a BBC drama in which she played a soldier with PTSD, she spent time at a rehabilitation centre. For Calm With Horses, she consulted a woman whose son was on a similar autistic spectrum to Ursula’s child. It clearly affected her. “The ignorance that some people have towards autism and how they blame the mother…” She sighs.

Niamh Algar as Dinah in The Virtues (Channel 4)

And in The Virtues, Algar played Dinah, a woman forced to give up her child. She arrived in the story “with a bang, literally, after punching her boyfriend out on the front porch”. To get into character, she was sent by creator Shane Meadows to order drinks in a “very fancy five-star hotel with half my hair shaved off, tattoos on my neck and trackie bottoms”. She nearly got kicked out.

Algar likes to play the underdogs. “The most interesting people are the ones who aren’t trying to be liked,” she smiles. “If anything, they’re shying away.”

Calm With Horses will be available digitally from 27 March

Read the rest of our Rising Stars interviews here.