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 wh...