CNN
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“The place do you wish to be once you’re 40?” Emma Morley asks Dexter Mayhew within the opening episode of Netflix’s new 14-part adaptation of “One Day,” David Nicholls’ 2009 bestseller.
Dexter glibly replies that he desires to be “well-known,” whereas Emma desires to alter the world – “not the entire world, simply my very own tiny nook of it.”
Ambika Mod, the 28 year-old actress who performs Emma, is effectively on her option to attaining each characters’ ambitions forward of schedule.
After a breakout flip within the acclaimed BBC miniseries “This Is Going to Damage,” Mod is now taking over her first main function as one half of the star-crossed lover-come-best buddy duo on the coronary heart of “One Day.”
Just like the novel – and the 2011 movie adaptation, which starred Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess – the sequence checks in on the lives of Emma and Dexter for in the future every year on July 15, St. Swithins’ Day.
“Each episode type of felt standalone,” Mod defined to CNN. “It’s like the buildup of moments and experiences and failures and successes that make up an individual.
“It’s a lot greater than only a Romance, it’s the entire spectrum of life and rising up.”
Mod made her begin within the trade in reside comedy, performing for a number of years on the Edinburgh Fringe Competition, first with college sketch troupe the Durham Revue after which alongside Andrew Shires in comedy duo Megan from HR. (Full disclosure: I attended college with Mod, the place we turned buddies.)
That comedy background shines via in abundance within the character of Emma, whose whip-smart, acerbic humor masks a a lot gentler and extra fragile soul.
Like Emma, Mod additionally studied English at college, solely to spend her early twenties in jobs she didn’t actually need. However regardless of attribute similarities, her path to the half was removed from easy.
“Once I first acquired requested to audition, I mentioned no to it a number of instances. I believed it was a waste of everybody’s time for me to even contemplate it,” she mentioned.
“To begin with, she’s written as a White girl. Second of all, I’d simply by no means have seen myself ever taking part in romantic leads. I acquired the message very early on from Western tv that that simply wasn’t the vibe.”
Her impostor syndrome was solely fuelled by the varieties of function she was being supplied after “This Is Going to Damage” aired in 2022.
“I didn’t actually really feel like quite a lot of the roles and auditions that had been coming to me had been that proper subsequent step up,” she defined.
“It type of simply felt like I used to be being put in my lane a bit as a brown girl. It was quite a lot of South Asian ladies in skilled jobs, very a lot aiding the plot in a procedural method. I’ve auditioned for lots of medical doctors, policewomen and attorneys.”
Ultimately, Mod determined “One Day” was too good a chance to move on, and after two days intensively making ready Emma’s Yorkshire accent, submitted a self-tape audition.
What adopted was a month-long technique of auditions and display assessments along with her soon-to-be co-star Leo Woodall, who on the time was awaiting his personal TV breakout as Jack, the mysterious “nephew” of Tom Hollander’s character within the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”
“One Day” is a sweeping love story at its coronary heart, which takes Emma and Dexter from Edinburgh to Greece, and Paris to Wolverhampton. So with the 2 leads on the middle of each episode, the present’s success depends virtually solely on the palpable chemistry between them.
“If the chemistry wasn’t there, it wouldn’t work,” Woodall advised CNN. “I believe we had been each simply type of fortunate – we clicked early, after which once we had been solid and began filming we had been buddies. We’d do icebreaker video games in between takes, and so fairly early we simply had an excellent sense of camaraderie.”
“The writing actually helped us,” Mod added. “However you may’t pretend or manufacture chemistry – it’s both there or it’s not, so we had been simply fortunate that issues flowed creatively from very early on.”
“One Day” is obtainable on Netflix from February 8.