Alexandra Roach

Alexandra Elizabeth Roach (born 20 August 1987) is a Welsh actress best known for her roles as Becky in Utopia and DS Joy Freers in No Offence. She has also made appearances in series including Being Human, Inside No. 9, Black Mirror and Killing Eve. Life and career Roach was born in Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, Wales. A number of her relatives, including her father Jeff (who went on to work for the Welsh Rugby Union), her brother and her sister, have been part of the police force at one point. A fluent Welsh speaker, Roach appeared in long-running television soap Pobol Y Cwm in her early teens and won Best Juvenile Actor in a Soap at the Children in Entertainment Awards. After leaving the series in 2005, she spent time with the National Youth Theatre of Wales before going on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating with a B.A. in acting in 2010. She has described how her Welsh accent counted against her in an early audition for a television role. "This old guy was the director and he was so well spoken, and he asked me where I was from, and I told him: 'Wales, Swansea,' and he just blanked me and turned to the casting director and said, 'oh no, she's not right'" ... So I said, 'I'm not going to do it in this voice, I'm going to do it with an English accent,' and he was like, 'no, honestly, there's no point'. He just wouldn't look at me, he wasn't listening to me." In May 2010 Roach appeared in The Door Never Closes by Rex Obano at the Almeida Theatre. A number of high-profile roles followed, including Sasha in Being Human, Beth Partridge in Candy Cabs, and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (in which she played notorious child murderer Constance Kent).