Playing Nice's Maddie star Niamh Algar's relationship with famous co-star
Irish actress Niamh Algar faces a parent’s worst nightmare in new ITV drama series Playing Nice, which begins on Sunday 5 January. She stars as Maddie, who along with her husband Pete, played by Happy Valley’s James Norton, discovers that their toddler son was switched with another baby boy at the hospital when he was born.
The distraught couple agree to meet the other parents involved, who have been raising Maddie and Pete’s biological son, but while things start out as amicably as they could do under the circumstances, twists and lies soon mean that everyone resorts to extreme lengths to protect their family.
It’s not the first gripping series that Niamh, 34, has been involved with. She rose to fame after appearing in the acclaimed Shane Meadows series The Virtues, alongside Stephen Graham, as a woman traumatised after she gave up her child as a teenager.
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Niamh also starred in the horror movie Censor and the TV drama series Deceit before leading the cast of the medical drama Malpractice in 2023. She starred as a hospital doctor being sued for malpractice following the death of a patient, and cast alongside her was Lorne MacFayden, who played her husband in the series and is her partner in real life.
Lorne is best known for his roles in Vigil, Tina and Bobby (where he played Bobby Moore) and Grantchester, and he is also a singer for the band Holy Fool.
Niamh, who also starred alongside Julianne Moore in the period drama series Mary and George, has previously spoken about working with Lorne on Malpractice in an interview with Fabric Magazine.
“My boyfriend was in the show with me. He was playing my husband,” she said. “We started it out like, this is great, everything is going amazing. And then there were scenes where we were fighting and arguing with each other. And we would go home, and it would be hard to be like, OK, that was the characters…”
“Letting go is something that I’m working on. And taking it a lot more seriously now that I have come out of a character like this – realising that, oh yeah, you should listen to yourself.”
The couple became Instagram official in 2021, and Niamh has shared photos and clips of Lorne online since, the most recent being on New Year’s Eve 2024 when the couple were in Skye and she posted a clip of Lorne and friends Ellie Houlihan and Ryan Baillie braving the icy waters of a rocky waterfall.
She included a freeze frame of herself in the water, looking absolutely frozen, backed by the TLC song Waterfalls and the words “So refreshing and beautiful!” that Niamh cheekily used to coax her friends into the water.
