She was rated 18th in The Independent on Sunday's Rainbow List 2014, which named her as an openly transgender actress in mainstream television, alongside others like Alexandra Billings, Laverne Cox and Adèle Anderson.

As a young person she performed with local drama groups as well as the prestigious National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, where she was a contemporary of actors Lucy Briers, Jonathan Cake, and Daniel Craig.

After finishing her sixth form education in 1987, Root moved to London full time in order to train as an actor at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts spent the next decade as a jobbing actor,[3] working in a range of television and theatre productions, notably in TV shows like Keeping Up Appearances and Casualty, and stage plays like The Lady's Not For Burning, Hamlet, and Tartuffe.

Before her breakthrough in 2015 playing a supporting role in the award-winning film The Danish Girl (her debut in film) and a lead role in the groundbreaking BBC Two romantic sitcom Boy Meets Girl, Root considered that she played roles described as “a romantic lead, debonair, knight, a soldier—typically and boringly ‘normal.’”[5] In 2015 Root also starred in the BBC Radio 4 drama 1977,[6] about the transgender popular composer Angela Morley who had become a household name to British radio audiences as Wally Stott.

It followed the year in which Morley was enlisted to complete composition of the musical soundtrack to the film Watership Down in three weeks flat.