39; Credit: ITV STUDIOS
“Playing a TV doctor made me keenly aware that I work in a profession where we can always ‘redo’ if something doesn’t work,” says Niamh Algar. “No one can 'go again' to A&E. At A&E, you have one chance. The pressure from this is so great that you need to develop real confidence in yourself and in the team around you. And if this faith in your talent or in your colleagues starts to crumble? Then everyone is in big trouble.”
The 30-year-old Irish actress, best known for her award-winning kickass performance as Dinah in Shane Meadows' gritty 2019 Channel 4 drama The Virtues, discusses her role in ITV's new action-packed drama Malpractice, written by former NHS doctor Grace Ofori-Attah , directed by Philip Barantini of Boiling Point. Algar plays Dr. Lucinda Edwards: a brilliant young medic who miscalls an opioid overdose patient one night and quickly finds her career, marriage, and sanity are in free fall.
As the daughter of an ER physician who recently lost her mother to a series of catastrophic ER mistakes, I found my sympathies twitching in different directions due to malpractice. If I were to watch it connected to a heart monitor, I suspect the reading would look like a mountain range. Throughout the series, Algar behaves like a human pressure cooker: as the official investigation into Dr. Edwards's professional behavior begins and the stakes around her rise, Algar holds a sharp master class in portraying internal stress.
So it's disconcerting when Algar relaxes in a scruffy pink sweatshirt during a weekend video call from his London home. “I've already sculpted some pottery,” she smirks, “wait, I'll show you…” She waves her Henry Moore-style clay female torso at me. «She's kind of a goddess.» The calm curves of the sculpture and the chatty warmth of the Algar contrast with the angular tension of Edwards.
Prior to filming, Algar says that she and Ofori-Attah, who studied medicine at Oxford and Cambridge, “talked a lot about how doctors can’t act like they’re stressed because people will go crazy. You have to pretend that everything is in order while you are at the helm of a sinking ship. To convey this underlying pressure, Algar drew attention to “where in the body anxiety accumulates: it moves upward from the stomach to the chest and then to the limbs. So you see her hands are shaking all the time and she's trying to stop it because she needs her hands to do her job.» />'Here's what's happening to doctors now': Niamh Algar accused of abuse of office. Photo: ITV STUDIOS
Algar also took the script home to discuss with her mother (nurse) and sister (veterinarian). “It was exciting to sit at the dinner table, listen to their stories and discuss some of the procedures and medical terminology,” she says. “Hearing how rare and traumatic that would be for A & The doctor should perform something as brutal, invasive as a thoracotomy [cut between the ribs to get to the lungs] and stick their hands right inside such a patient. It brought me closer to understanding their life experiences.”
Algar was born in 1992 and grew up in the countryside near Mullingar, County Westmeath, in the center of Ireland. “I never played the lead in a school play,” she says. “I was too tall. If you're playing Grease, they want Sandy, who is smaller than Danny. Tall girls should stand in the back. So when I told my parents that I wanted to be an actor, they only saw me on stage as “background artist number three.” I could see how they work to tell me that no one has any idea if I have the potential to be good or not. And my brothers and sisters have reasonable jobs. My older brother is a surveyor.”
At first she was persuaded to study design in Dublin, but she soon began skipping lectures, signing up for as many acting classes as she could afford. «Then I was invited to this course and there was Barry Keoghan [star of the Banshee of Inisherin] and the Gleason boys [acting siblings Brian and Domhnall] and that was the start of my career.» She then took a budget flight to London, signed with an agent, and landed roles first in Virtues and then in Ridley Scott's American sci-fi series Raised by Wolves (2020–22).
Kick-ass: Niamh Algar as Dina in Virtues. Photo: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo
“I haven’t had a proper haircut in a long time,” she laughs. “Shane [Meadows] loves to be present when a character is going through a transformation. So he was on the hair and makeup bus, and they were going to shave my entire head for The Virtues. After they did one side, he decided to leave it like that. Then he said that my hair color was too natural and made me bleach it because Dina is not the kind of character that goes to the salon, she does her hair at home. And Shane thought she'd have neck tattoos and an Adidas tracksuit.»
Algar remembers popping into the local M & S. in Dina's clothes, followed by a store security guard. “I went to the checkout, smiled at him and waved. But he didn't smile back. I realized that he thought I was going to rob the place. And I realized that Dina felt like this all the time: people always looked at her like she did something bad. I think you have to experience it to really understand it.» And then Ridley Scott gave her a mullet, which, in her words, «really cooled her ears.»
Not every actor starts his career with such famous directors as Meadows and Scott. Algar says that despite their different styles, both men “create very carefully detailed worlds and then develop your character with you. Ridley tells you: «I create the world, you can play in it.»
'I like playing people who don't make immediate sense: Niamh Algar in Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves. Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive
Algar brings a muscular intelligence to how she evaluates her characters. «I like to play with puzzle people,» she says, «people who don't make immediate sense.»
When it came to understanding the world of Malpractice, Algar realized she needed to experience the reality of working in a hospital room. She followed the consultant for the entire shift and learned that, “As a patient, you don't see how much work is going on behind the scenes. You don't realize that by the time you go to the doctor, 90 percent of the work is already done.
“They ruthlessly calculate time and risk. They think: this person has been waiting for five hours, I have about 10 minutes to diagnose him and understand what he needs. If they need a bed, I might have to move someone else. I tell her that my doctor friend once described A&E as «human tetris,» and she nods emphatically.
“When we were filming Malpractice,” she continues, “Grace constantly reminded us that this is what is happening to doctors right now in the UK in 2023. Because this is a story about a workforce that has gone through massive trauma on the front lines, coping with Covid and then realizing that nothing has changed.” Algar shakes his head. “It was all bubbling while we were filming. The junior doctors voted to strike. They run on old hardware, old and outrageously slow computer software.” She thinks politicians could also spend time spying on doctors — «that should be part of the job of the Minister of Health: spend a week in the emergency room» — so they can better legislate to improve conditions.
“Doctors and nurses,” she sighs. “They give so much of themselves. I saw this with my mom when I was growing up. I see it in good friends who are now doctors. I hope this show will help viewers put themselves in the shoes of doctors in a critical situation.
“When I first read this script, I felt like I wanted to get to the bottom of it and help Lucinda,” adds Algar. “But I know the public will judge her. She is a broken character. She doesn't always make the right choice. But then who?
The Malpractice starts on ITV1 today at 21:00
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