There is a date next month that Ambika Mod cannot think past. It’s the release of One Day on Netflix, which I suspect is going to catapult her to stardom – even if she says she doesn’t know what to expect and is trying not to think about it. Adapted from the bestselling novel by David Nicholls, the drama follows Emma (played by Mod) and Dexter (The White Lotus’s Leo Woodall), who meet as they’re about to leave university, and then catches up with them on that exact July date every year for the next two decades as their lives unfold. The funny thing is, she says, her life is developing its own One Day – with the date that the series is going to be released. It was also that February day in 2022 when the BBC drama This Is Going to Hurt came out, which was Mod’s breakout role.
She read Nicholls’s novel when it was published in 2009, and she was about 13. “It’s one of my favourite books,” she says, which is one of the reasons she originally turned down the chance to audition. “I was an idiot,” she says now, when we meet in a London restaurant. “This Is Going to Hurt had just come out, and I was feeling very overwhelmed. I think it was a combination of that and really loving the book, and thinking: ‘I can’t do this, I shouldn’t do this, I’m not Emma.’” About a month later – “and this is not hyperbole” – her eyes snapped open in bed and she realised she’d made a mistake. She rang her agent in the morning and sent in a taped audition. The longer the process went on, the more she wanted it. “I was just ready for the challenge, I wanted to push myself. This was by far the best opportunity [following This Is Going to Hurt] and I just love the character and the book. I feel I’ve manifested my 13-year-old dream, so it felt quite magical.”
