‘One Day’ Star Ambika Mod Talks ‘Infamous Chemistry Reads’ With Leo Woodall and How Kim Kardashian Let Her Know the Series Was a Big Hit
“One Day” star Ambika Mod was 19 years old when she decided she wanted to be a comedian. She had discovered stand-up and improv comedy while at university, but never told her parents, who emigrated to the U.K. from India, about her plans.
“They’d be like, ‘No, no, that’s not stable and you’ll be poor,’” Mod, now 28, says on this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast. “I had to show them via actions, not words.”
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She first began performing at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival while still a student. Several appearances in short films followed before she landed her first major role two years ago in BBC’s medical drama “This Is Going to Hurt” opposite Ben Whishaw.
Then came her starring role in “One Day,” Netflix’s limited series adaptation of the bestselling novel. The 14-episode series (a redemption of sorts after a 2011 film flop starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess) follows Emma (Mod) and Dexter (Leo Woodall of “The White Lotus”) over a 20-year period, beginning when they meet at their graduation ball at the University of Edinburgh. While she’s from a working-class family and he’s a privileged, big man on campus, the two form an unlikely friendship that eventually leads to a romance tragically cut short.
I caught up with Mod over Zoom from her London-area home.
What was your “One Day” audition like?
There was an initial tape and then a recall with the director, and then we had the chemistry reads — the infamous chemistry reads. I had another round after that, where I had to be signed off by a dialect coach because I was doing the Yorkshire accent, and I couldn’t really do it when I was auditioning. I remember my agent called me being like, “They love you for the part, but they’re worried about the accent.” And I was like, “No shit. It’s a terrible accent. Help me.” I met with a dialect coach on a Saturday night, and I got the part a couple of days later.
I didn’t realize that dialect coaches sign off on castings.
I don’t know if they do, but I think in this instance, I very much could not do the accent. They were like, “Well, can she learn it?” When I met the dialect coach Natalie Grady, we did a session together, and she was like, “You can clearly learn it. You’ll be fine.” As soon as I got the part, we went into three sessions a week and then we kept having sessions throughout the shoot. We were really militant about it.
Now tell me about the “infamous chemistry reads.”
It was a long day. There were about four Emmas and four Dexters, and we all read with each other over the course of a day.
Once you did a chemistry read with one Dexter, did you feel like you were cheating on him when you were with the next Dexter?
Yeah, because the first Dexter, I was like, “Oh, he was great. This makes sense now.” And then I read with the second Dexter, who happened to be Leo…The first Dexter I read with and Leo are two very different actors with two very different takes on Dexter. Leo had been flying back and forth from Sicily because he was filming “The White Lotus” at the time. He was in a very different head space, and I think he had that cheeky, chappy thing going on, which is still relevant for Dexter. But chemistry is so unquantifiable. You either have it or you don’t. I left that day feeling very clueless about whether or not I was going to get the part — and if I did, who was going to be the Dexter.
Did you and Leo spend time together to get to know each other before filming?
We met once before we started because he was doing “White Lotus,” and I finished another job a week before I started on “One Day.” We met on the South Bank, and we were like, “Let’s have a coffee.” We ended up having a gin and tonic, chatting and doing a whistle-stop tour of each other’s lives. The day after, we did the first table read, and that was the first prep week. We basically had no rehearsals.
How did you prepare to shoot the accident scene?
I didn’t prepare massively. There wasn’t, actually, any time to really prepare. We had a 10-page day of filming, which is a lot. I was quite nervous because in the script it was very clear that, “We see the light fade from her eyes.” I think dying on screen is a really hard thing to do. And then it was minus-one degree, and I was lying on the concrete. They put a rain machine on, and they were like, “We’re just going to leave you here now and then we’re going to go in, out, in, out, so we can just get it done so you don’t freeze.” It was a very hard scene to shoot practically, but then also a very hard scene to watch, because it’s so abrupt.
When did you realize “One Day” was a hit?
There are two answers to this. My first answer is when I watched it for the first time last November. I remember feeling really proud of myself because the shoot was really hard. You lose sight of the work sometimes when you’re in an environment that intense for eight months and you’re flying all over the world and it’s 16-hour days. To be able to step back after nine months, after we’d finished, to watch it and be like, “Oh, we made a really, really good thing and we made something that’s really faithful to the book…” The second moment was when Kim Kardashian posted about it on her Instagram story.
Did your friends call you and say, “You’re not going to believe what I just saw on Instagram”?
My sister, who is so much more excited about all of this stuff than I could ever be, messaged me with a screenshot of it, and I was like, “Holy fuck. This is the big time.” She’s got 400 million followers or something like that. We were all laughing as well, because she said, “Kinda slow but worth sticking through because the end … If you want a good cry.” We were like, “OK, Kim. Yeah, thanks for the note. We’ll take that on board for next time.”
What was the first audition you ever went on?
Nick Mohammed from “Ted Lasso” gave me my first proper professional audition. We met when I was at university because he went to my uni and we did a comedy show together that I put on when I was in my final year. A couple of years later, out of the blue, he emailed me being like, “Oh, I’m writing sitcom [‘Intelligence’]. David Schwimmer is going to be in it. Would you like to come and audition for one of the lead roles?” And I was like, “Yes, I would do anything to do that.” I went and auditioned for that, and I didn’t get it, but it was a really nice feeling to think that Nick had seen me doing comedy a couple of years ago, and they thought about me when they were casting this role. After that, I asked him to be my mentor.
This interview has been condensed and edited. Listen to the full conversation on the “Just for Variety” podcast above or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
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