Alexandra Roach “would live in a lovely house by now” if she had stayed in her first job, on the long-running Welsh-language soap Pobol y Cwm. From the age of 12, she spent four years playing Elin, but she knew she wanted a challenge. “I wanted to hone in on the craft of acting and really get down to the bare bones of it. I wanted to become really good at it.” And so she enrolled at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).
It was tough, nothing like the magical Hogwarts experience she had expected. Lessons started at 7.30am, and Roach and her classmates sometimes stayed at school until 10pm. Having moved from her hometown of Ammanford in south-west Wales, London was a culture shock and Roach often found herself overwhelmed.
“It was way, way harder than I had anticipated,” she says, “but I made some great friends.” She still refers to classmates Susan Wokoma (Chewing Gum, Year of the Rabbit) and Daisy May Cooper (This Country) as “my girls”.
“In third year, everyone took everything so seriously – you have to get an agent and go out into the industry,” she says. “Sharing a dressing room with Daisy and Suze certainly took the edge off.”
Roach’s first job after RADA was another challenge: playing a young Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. For a woman from a small Welsh town, perniciously affected by many of Thatcher’s policies, the role was controversial. She wasn’t nervous. “I always get asked why I didn’t turn it down. I’m like, ‘are you kidding?’” she says. “There’s a real challenge in playing a character and not judging them.
With Thatcher I had to find out what we had in common, rather than what we didn’t. I was just out of drama school, I was ambitious, young, feisty and opinionated, and so was she when she was trying to get into Westminster as a young MP. It was those similarities that helped me bring her to life.”
Roach, now 33, is instantly recognisable to regular TV watchers, though her range means, unlike some of her colleagues, she has not yet been defined by one character. Instead, her CV reads like a “best TV of the decade” list. In Channel 4’s spiky cop drama No Offence, she played endearing and bright DS Joy Freers; in sci-fi Utopia she was determined, feisty Becky. She’s appeared in Inside No 9, Black Mirror and Killing Eve, and last Christmas she could even be heard as the voice of the Sunburnt Mermaid in Zog and the Flying Doctors. “The older I get, I am looking for complex female characters,” she says. “I’ve played the ingénue, but now I want to step out.”
Roach speaks with a gentle, charming south Welsh accent. “At drama school they taught us to speak with RP [received pronunciation], but that can be quite limiting in itself,” she says. “[But] if I didn’t learn that, I’d just be playing Welsh women my entire life, but I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
Her current role is in ITV’s surveillance thriller Viewpoint. She plays Zoe Sterling, a single mother (with a Welsh accent) who lives in a flat on the outskirts of Manchester city centre. When her neighbour and friend Gemma (Amy Wren) goes missing, the police notice that her windows provide the perfect vantage point from which to spy on their key suspect, Gemma’s boyfriend Greg (Fehinti Balogun). Before she knows it, she’s sharing her home with surveillance operative Martin, played by Noel Clarke.
“I like her because she’s quite messy and complicated and flawed,” explains Roach. Before the cast and crew were stood down when the pandemic hit in February 2020, she was struggling to internalise her character’s sense of loneliness – a problem soon remedied by lockdown. “With telly, it’s so rare that you get to sit with a character for five months and try to work them out; it was one of the perks of the pandemic,” she says.
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It was easy to develop chemistry with her fellow cast, too, as Roach, Clarke, Balogun and Bronagh Waugh, who plays Martin’s colleague Stella, formed a lockdown bubble. “Instead of going to the pub like normal, we’d all just cook for each other… or mostly order Deliveroo, if I’m honest.”
Drama school might have taught her the nuts and bolts of acting, but Roach learns just as much on the job. “You have to just be in the moment and listen to the other actors and see what they’re giving you,” she says. “That’s the challenge; you can’t be too stuck in your ways. You have to be able to be movable and open.”
Roach’s career has given her the chance to learn from the best. She would come to set on her days off to watch Meryl Streep (who was Oscar nominated for playing the older Thatcher in The Iron Lady) perform and cites Maxine Peake, with whom she co-starred in 2012’s Private Peaceful and Julie Walters, whom she worked alongside in the Paul Potts biopic One Chance, as some of the actors from whom she has learnt the most. She is reluctant to speculate on actors she’d love to work with in the future: “That’s a really dangerous mentality, in this industry jobs come and go. The disappointment that comes with that is really fragile.”
To combat the vulnerability that comes with putting her career in other people’s hands, Roach has recently launched her own production company, Yes Mate, with her friend and writer Jenny Duffy. “It’s great to have another passion that’s not acting; it feels new and exciting. I’m learning so much. It feels empowering to gain control in the industry,” she says.
Over lockdown she dipped her toe into directing on Sex Lives, a funny monologue series Yes Mate created in collaboration with her No Offence co-star Joanna Scanlan, which lifted the lid on women’s sexual experiences. “We want to focus on telling stories through the female gaze and channel challenging stereotypes.”
Ten years after starring in her first movie, the decision 16-year-old Roach made to leave Pobol y Cwm has paid off. Nevertheless, Roach has remained grounded, living in London and preparing for her first baby with her club promoter husband, Jack. She still finds herself enamoured with the quirkier aspects of being an actor.
“Every role I get I think, ‘this is mad’,” she says. “I played a mythical dwarf in The Huntsman: Winter’s War. I was in prosthetics and a fat suit for hours every day. Every time I would walk past a mirror, I’d think ‘this is crazy, this is my job’.”
Viewpoint starts at 9pm on ITV on Monday 26 April
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