.theguardian - 2 days ago

The Irish actor started out with Shane Meadows but her career is now stratospheric. As she takes on big tech in The Iris Affair, she talks about nerves, AI nightmares – and battling a malevolent supercomputerExplosions 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. Continue reading...

Latest News

Hashtags:   

terror

 | 

Hollander

 | 

Niamh

 | 

Algar

 | 

thriller

 | 

Sources