When the actor Leo Woodall and I first meet, at a vegan café in north London, not far from the home he shares with his older brother, we have an improbably polite exchange about whether or not to order breakfast, it being just after breakfast time but not yet lunch.
“I’ll eat something if you eat something,” Woodall says.
“I’m OK,” I say. “Really.”
“You’re not going to get something?”
“Not if you’re not,” I say.
“Well, I’m definitely getting something then,” he says, “so you can eat.”
The rest of our conversation goes something like this. Throughout our meeting, Woodall, who is 27, is considered and earnest. At times he turns away from me and speaks out into the café, so quietly I almost cannot hear him – aware, I think, that other customers might be listening in. This is a relatively new situation for him. In 2022, Woodall appeared in season two of the Emmy-winning HBO series The White Lotus, in which he played a “cheeky Essex boy” involved in a deliciously wild murder plot. (Woodall’s character, Jack, wears a tattoo on his neck that reads “Cowabunga”; as the series progresses, a fun-loving charm unravels into menace.) Lotus, which was directed by Mike White and filmed in Sicily during the 2021 holiday off-season, was Woodall’s first big job – he had previously appeared in a single episode of Holby City, the discontinued hospital drama, and, “for five minutes,” a YA vampire drama – and it hurled him into the public consciousness.
When I ask how he is dealing with fame, he says, “To be honest, I don’t consider myself to be famous,” and then, “I’ve experienced crumbs of what famous people experience.” But the remarks seem practised. Last year, while he was in New York with his Lotus co-star Meghann Fahy, the pair were followed by a photographer, who “cycled from block to block to block, trying to remain hidden” – a sure sign that life has changed. Strangers regularly approach him in public now; some even know his name. At the café, a waiter who is at first curt to me becomes buoyant on Woodall’s arrival. Later, looking around, I realise people might well be listening in.
Woodall and I are meeting to discuss a major Netflix adaptation of One Day, the David Nicholls novel, in which Woodall leads alongside the actor Ambika Mod. The project will do nothing to lower his profile. One Day revolves around the years-long relationship between Emma Morley, a hard-working northerner, and Dexter Mayhew, a character Nicholls describes as someone who “hoped one day for a retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be”. Woodall plays Mayhew and he does so with the frayed edges of someone who wants to be good, but cannot always find the ways to be so. Partway through One Day, Mayhew’s beloved mother dies. His interpersonal behaviour slides from poor to damaging, he slips into addiction and his false-start of a television career goes awry. Eventually, he becomes a husband and a father, and he begins works at a café, and when all seems to be going well – Mayhew by this point realising that perhaps what he wants from life is not fame and fortune, but a more simple kind of happiness – his wife cheats on him. “You know, he goes through a lot,” Woodall says. “His journey is tumultuous, it’s a rollercoaster. And perhaps he’s not well equipped enough to deal with it.”
Woodall sees Mayhew as deeply flawed, but ultimately decent. He has described Jack, his Lotus character, similarly, which is surprising, given how central Jack is to a plot-line involving a conspiracy to kill off a wealthy hotel guest. When I ask Woodall, “Do you always see the good in people?” he responds, “I prefer to, it’s healthier.” Then he adds, “I feel that most people, the people you meet on a daily basis, they are good. And often you find a way to recognise the signs that someone’s going through something. It’s not black and white, is it? This person is being a dickhead, therefore they are a dickhead?” He shakes his head, and then another thought occurs. “I mean, sometimes people are just dickheads.”
Mayhew is not a dickhead. He is “deeply selfish,” Woodall admits, and “horrible to Emma”, and he “goes to these really shit places”. You could describe him as indifferent at best and troublingly egotistical at worst. And yet “there is still something good in him.” He is a person who is trying, like all of us.
Woodall watched a first cut of One Day in Los Angeles, alone, worried how the series would play out with him leading it. (A film adaptation of the book, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, and released in 2011, had been a flop – a catastrophe for legions of the novel’s fans.) Woodall was using a Netflix account he shared with his mother, “so every time I tried to watch it, it would block her out,” he says. “My mum said something very sweet: ‘Surely, if you’re the lead in a Netflix show, they give you your own account.’ I said, ‘No, mum, that’s not how it works.’”
gold chain by heyharper.com. Photograph: Zoe McConnell/The Observer
He had auditioned for One Day while filming Lotus. Once, moving between a Sicilian set and a London audition room, he forgot to remove Jack’s cowabunga tattoo, and panicked Netflix casting agents, who worried it was real. (“Towards the end of the audition bits were peeling off.”) Woodall is certain he landed One Day because he had already been cast in Lotus – it had given him “an edge” during auditions, to be flying in from a major set. He is less sure why he was cast in Lotus, an established HBO hit whose cast was kitted out with famous actors.
“It shouldn’t really have happened for me at that point,” he says. “White Lotus is a star-studded show and I was not a star. I was not even someone who had been on television before.” He goes on, “I was lucky that Mike White doesn’t give a fuck about stardom. I did a tape, I did it well, he liked it.” Later he adds: “Gamechanger!”
Woodall was born in Hammersmith, west London, into a “fairly posh middle-class” family. He talks less like Jack and more like Mayhew, who uses the received pronunciation of privilege. As well as an older brother, Woodall has an older sister and he considers himself “the baby” of the family. (“I was a bit spoilt.”) Though his father once described him as “a taciturn child”, he was, until 11, a content kid. But at secondary school he slipped helplessly into deep water. There were bigger boys. Some feigned friendship, then stabbed him in the back. One pinned his neck to a wall; another beat him in the chest. (“Like, it was a shit school,” Woodall says. “You know: violence.”) Once, at a house party, the stabbing almost happened literally. A boy Woodall had only recently come to know demanded the gloves he was wearing. A knife appeared. Woodall handed them over.
These experiences changed him. He became sullen and preferred not to leave the house, fearing the worst would happen. At school he began to put on a character. “I started shaving my eyebrows,” he recalls. “I shaved my head. I wore a hood all the time, changed the way I talked. It was a kind of survival instinct, I think. To fit in. But I wasn’t nice. I lashed out. My mum was worried.”
During our conversation, this time is referred to hyperbolically as “the dark years” and Woodall suggests the period might be the reason he has been cast to play complicated, often angsty young men. (He later made new friends – “boys who played ping-pong at lunchtime, people we had considered to be nerds” – and escaped.) But this period was not the reason he turned to acting in the first place. Woodall comes from a family of performers. His father is the actor Andrew Woodall. His stepfather is the actor Alexander Morton, who for many years appeared in Monarch of the Glen, and is now retired. (Morton met Woodall’s mother, Jane, who also went to drama school, but did not pursue an acting career, in London, where she was briefly his landlady.) “And my mum’s mum’s mum,” Woodall goes on, of his acting pedigree, “somewhere down the line…” (He is referring to the silent-film actor Maxine Elliott who was a star in the 1910s.)
For a long time, Woodall did not consider performing a career option. His father would tell him, “Whatever you do, don’t be a fucking actor,” though he was never truly serious. When Woodall and his brother were children – and when they were not playing sport, or fighting – they liked to role-play. Sometimes Woodall would “pretend to be Aragorn from Lord of the Rings”. Or he and his brother would re-enact the final scene from The Matrix. (“My brother, being an older brother, would always take Morpheus, and I always had to be Trinity, which, as a 10-year-old boy…”) He’d be running around the playground and his father would mutter, “Put that boy on a stage.” When Woodall eventually spoke to his parents about his decision to become an actor, he was nervous. “They’d known so many actors in their lives, in the family and outside the family, and they knew how hard it could be.” But they were supportive. “I think they knew I’d probably end up being one.”
Given that he comes from a family of actors, I ask, “Do you ever feel pressure?”
He half-smiles, half-grimaces. “I was so nervous about what my family would think of me as an actor,” he says. “Just, was I any good?” He goes on, “I’ve always felt this personal pressure to make it. And they’ve always been wonderful and supportive.”
When asked where that feeling comes from, Woodall says, “It’s the same with a lot of kids who want to make their family proud, who want to succeed, be good at what they do…”
“It’s an approval thing?” I ask. “It’s definitely an approval thing,” he says. “It’s nothing to do with how they are. It’s completely self-inflicted. And that’s OK, I suppose. It’s a motivator.”
Woodall went to drama school at 19. He had been working at a bar, smoking weed, directionless. “I was thinking, What am I going to do? I wasn’t too worried about it. I wasn’t stressed. But I thought: ‘Perhaps, now I’m creeping into my 20s, I should think about it.’” (This experience is similar to Mayhew’s, who is described in One Day as thinking of travel and not much else, as a viable post-graduation plan.) Woodall didn’t perform well at school. “I didn’t really give a fuck about my grades, so it wasn’t like I could just go to university to study economics.” Other than acting, what else was he to do?
During his final year of drama school, Woodall was assigned to perform in a production of the David Hare play Pravda, a satire on journalism. He was given the part of a septuagenarian eccentric, which didn’t go down well. “I had kind of shown throughout drama school that the thing I was good at playing was this kind of broken young man in turmoil. But for this play, my tutors asked me to play a fucking 72-year-old guy called Elliot Fruit-Norton, who was out there and flowery. I was like, really? This is where we finally show ourselves to the public and this is the thing you make me do? Can you not give me a role I’m going to be good at?”
The work that has come since drama school – The White Lotus, and now One Day – has entered him into a world in which he is allowed to be “snobby about hotels”, Woodall says.” When I ask how else he has changed, he responds, “You know, I’m making a bit more money. And there’s freedom that comes with that. But I try not to let it get to my head.”
“What would happen if it went to your head?” I ask.
He looks around the café, briefly considers the question, and then says, “Oh, I’d be an unbearable fucker.”
One Day launches on Netflix 8 February
Fashion editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Petra Sellge at The Wall Group; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photography assistant Nick Graham; shot at JJ locations
