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3 Feb 2024, 16:52
One Day turned into many, many days for the young stars of the new Netflix series adaptation of David Nicholls' best-selling book.
The series launches next Thursday (8th February) on Netflix, telling the story of Emmy Morley and Dexter Mayhew.
On 15th July 1998, the night of their graduation, Emma (Ambika) and Dexter (Leo) speak for the first time.
The next morning, they go their separate ways, but where will they be on this one ordinary day the next year, and the year after that, and every year that follows?
Each episode finds Dex and Em, one year older, on this one particular date as they grow and change, move together and apart, experience joy and heartbreak.
For up and coming actors, Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod, the road to completing their adaptation of One Day for Netflix was much longer than their Hollywood counter parts, Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, in the 2011 film adaptation.
Although in the past, many major shows had episode rosters in the twenties, it has become far more common for productions to favour quality over quantity, with many actors expecting to make at most ten episodes of a show per series.
However in the case of adapting a book which follows the lives of two characters over the course of two decades Nicholls, who serves as an executive producer on the show, felt that key plot points, that were intrinsic to understanding the characters' relationship, were missed in the comparatively short run time of the film.
So in the case of this adaptation, quality will come from the quantity.
Artistically and structurally this makes a lot of sense, but for the relatively new-to-acting leads the workload and pressure can greatly increase, as there is much more time to expose potential gaps in their performance.
Speaking on The Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose, the pair talked about the challenges that an 'eight month shoot' present them.
For Leo, the trials began right at the first audition, as although he had finalised filming of his breakout role in the second series of The White Lotus, it was yet to be released and therefore awkward questions had to be answered about a certain feature of Leo's body.
He explained that although casting were excited about seeing him, due to having landing a role on a primetime HBO show, they weren't aware of his character's criminal background.
So when they saw him come in with a massive 'cowabunga' tattoo across his neck as he had 'just flown in from Sicily' where he was shooting White Lotus, the casting team all feared that it was real.
Fortunately, for Leo and the team, that wasn't the case.
Once cast, Leo demonstrated his obvious talent and went through many chemistry tests with various potential love interests until they struck gold with Ambika, who originally turned the role down.
Having only recently come to a career in acting, with a stand out performance with Ben Whishaw' in This Is Going to Hurt, Ambika feared she'd not do the book and character, that she loved, justice.
She said: "It [This Is Going to Hurt] had been up for like, a couple of months or a month or so. And so I had those credentials behind me. But yeah, I got the audition for it.
"But I turned it down originally. Because I was like, nah, like, I'm not gonna... I'm not going to do that. Like, I love the book too much, I love the character too much. It's not me. Idiot!
"And then I've actually sort of sent a tape in and then I got the part a couple of months later."
Although both seemed to have doubts over their lack of experience before the show, having been through the experience together, with four separate directors across the run of episodes, and came out the other end with skills honed and many lessons learned.
Leo said he loved working with so many directors as 'they all had different approaches,' which provided more opportunities.
Ambika added: "Also, because we're quite early on in our careers, work with as many directors as you can, because they're all so different.
"They all work so differently, very different attitudes and approaches to staff and how experienced they were, it was very different. So it was a real mix, you learnt alot."
All episodes of One Day are available on Netflix from the 8th February 2024.
Listen to The Graham Norton Radio Show every Saturday AND Sunday from 9.30am on Virgin Radio or catch up on-demand here.
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