Alexandra Roach

What would you like to learn?
I would love to learn Spanish. I have the duo-lingo app on my phone which makes me feel great and that I am nearly fluent – the reality being far from that! I am certain I need lessons from a real human being to improve – which I will endeavour to do this year!

What was your favourite music experience/ moment?
I travel when I can to experience music in different settings. My absolute favourite being ‘Meadows In The Mountains’ Festival in the Bulgarian mountains.
It is a relatively new and small festival located in a mountain village, you stay with the locals who host you and look after you, they have three stages filled with musicians, bands and DJ’s. As the sun sets the shadows of the mountains and trees become a new adventure to explore. If you can make it until sun rise it is the most magical festival moment. In a regular festival people face the DJ and dance – but here as the setting is so beautiful everyone is dancing and watching the sun rise, when it finally arrived everyone cheered – if you are a music and nature lover then it’s a must!

What was the last thing you took a picture of?
The last picture I took was of the two kissing policemen in the Banksy Exhibition I visited in Amsterdam this weekend. Even though I live in Bristol – the home of Banksy, I had never seen all of his work in an exhibition before.

What do you wish you still had time for – or more time for – when you’re working a lot?
My gran. It’s hard being away from her, but we speak on the phone in Welsh and I get home to see her when I can. She is an incredible woman who I adore.

What was the last moment of your life that you felt was highly memorable?
For my birthday this year – I had my closest four friends over for brunch, we sat and caught up and celebrated. Over the years friends come and go in your life which is a weird thing but around that table were my friends who I see in my life for a long time that I really respect and value and we were all listening and making each other laugh. We then went dancing and it was a perfect birthday.

If you could watch a film that you haven’t yet seen for the first time in a theatre, which film would you pick?
Paris is Burning – a documentary film which explores the ball culture of New Yorkers in the 1980’s and the gay and transgender, American and Latino communities involved in it. It deals with racism, homophobia, AIDS and poverty. It’s essentially a story of survival but doing so with humour, grit and energy. I would love to see that in a theatre for the first time – think I would be voguing down the aisle! The soundtrack is incredible.

What film do you find you return to because you continue to find new nuances to appreciate or focus on upon each rewatch?
The film I re-visit is Victoria, a film supposedly shot in one take about a girl’s 24hrs in Berlin. I re-watch it as I can’t get my head around how they did it! Apparently they rehearsed it loosely and did three takes over three nights. It really pushed the actors and the audience you really feel like your on this tense journey with them. It really inspired me.

You appear in the most recent series of Black Mirror, where your character is the subject of a radical experiment with unexpected consequences. What is a technology or invention featured in contemporary sci-fi that you think has the greatest likelihood of never being a practical feature of future life? (Past example: jetpacks)
When I watch Black Mirror the technology inventions in each episode always give you chills as you think this could actually be a part of future life one day… that’s what makes it so clever and disturbing I just hope we never get to the dog robots in the MetalHead episode… that was dark. I can’t see a way back from there.

Alexandra Roach can be seen now in Black Mirror on Netflix (worldwide).

As told to Paul Vaughan for TPJ
Creative Director & Photographer: Jessie Craig
Stylist: Harriet Byczok
Makeup & Hair: Dani Guinsberg