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In Netflix’s limited series adaptation of One Day, David Nicholls’s cult-favorite 2009 novel, Dexter (Leo Woodall) and Emma (Ambika Mod) spend a night together after their college graduation in 1988. They drink and smoke, listen to tapes, talk about their future—but they don’t have sex, to the chagrin of Emma’s roommate and best friend. Emma’s stubborn determination to resist her own lust and get to know Dexter as a person is played to perfection by the 29-year-old Mod—equally prickly and darkly funny.
In fact, Emma was a character that had meant so much to Mod (she’d read the book at 13), she didn’t even want to audition. “I didn’t think that I was right for the part,” she says. “I thought I would be wasting everyone’s time if I even taped for it. Then I just woke up in bed one night and I was like, I’ve made a massive mistake. I called my agent the next morning and I was like, ‘Is it too late to tape? What’s the vibe?’” Long story short, a month and a half later the role was hers.
When Mod talks about One Day, her reverence for the source material is still apparent. Its story unfolds over a single day—July 15—across 20 years, as Dexter and Emma figure out their paths into adulthood, together or apart. Over Zoom, Mod, dressed in a red sweater, gesticulates all over the place. “It’s all a bit mad,” she says, laughing, of the role. (A previous film adaptation, from 2011, cast Anne Hathaway in the same part.) Given the book’s fiercely loyal fan base, getting the relationship between Dexter and Emma right was key—and luckily, Mod and Woodall are wonderful together, their banter quick, smart, and swoony. “We just sort of let that unfold naturally,” Mod says. “It was a combination of so many pieces falling into place—we had really amazing writing, the chemistry was there from the beginning. There was a lot of creative flow, a really easy back and forth.”
The presence of intimacy coordinators, Katharine Hardman and Elle McAlpine, was another aid. (McAlpine also worked on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.) “We all sat down and had a really in-depth discussion about the relationship, about what the intimacy in that relationship would look like, about how it evolves, how it differs from the intimacy in other relationships,” Mod says. “I’d never thought about sex and intimacy in that way before, but it was so revealing and so helpful.” She can hardly wait for the Dexter and Emma stans to hit the internet. “It would be an honor and a privilege if some 15-year-old girl somewhere decides to spend the day cutting me and Leo into a nice, succinct TikTok.”
Still, One Day feels, more than anything, like Emma’s story: Everyone’s met an Emma, or, more likely, feels like an Emma—whip-smart, funny, and passionate, but also insecure and unsure of her life’s purpose. “She is the character that everyone who reads the book relates to,” Mod says. In her many conversations with showrunner Nicole Taylor, they discussed creating an Emma that “was as funny and as smart as possible, because that’s her power, that’s her currency—her intelligence and her wit,” Mod continues. “There’s something very British about her sense of humor and about her temperament. That was something that I was really eager to make obvious in this adaptation. In many ways, I hope I bring my own flavor to Emma as well.”
Indeed, as the British-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Mod had hesitated to audition, in part, because it remains so rare for Brown and Black women to be cast in major literary adaptations. Though there is no direct reference to Emma’s race in the book, it’s assumed that she is white—something Hathaway’s appearance in the film only served to reinforce. Mod feels that she internalized that kind of bias growing up. “There was so much of me that didn’t see myself playing this role. I think that was a result of messaging that had been fed to me, as well as my own internal dialogue,” she says. “It took a lot of self-convincing, a lot of wrapping my head around it, [even] well into the shoot. I wasn’t convinced that me and Leo were a believable Emma and Dexter, and that was all to do with me not feeling like I belonged.”
Growing up, she had been told “explicitly and implicitly” that women who looked like her “don’t get to play romantic leads.” She hopes, however, that that narrative is changing. Besides, Mods adds, “There’s so much about [Emma] that I think feeds into the identity that young women of color have.”
For one thing, class plays an important part in her story: While Emma comes from a working class family in Leeds, Dexter comes from significant wealth. “Dexter has every privilege in the world—[he] comes out of university, gets his dream job, gets his dream flat, gets women throwing themselves at him, and she really struggles at the end of the day,” Mod explains. So, it was crucial that Emma could hold her own intellectually. “That’s really important to show in their dynamic,” Mod says.
So, too, is Emma’s sense of humor—not least because Mod is such a skilled comedian. At St. Mary’s College, Durham, Mod stumbled into doing stand-up and ended up loving it. After graduation, she juggled acting classes and auditions, comedy shows, and a day job to make ends meet. Then, after considering a move to Chicago to try out for the Second City, in 2020 Mod was cast as Shruti Acharya, a junior doctor, opposite Ben Whishaw’s Adam Kay in the BBC series This Is Going to Hurt. She jokes that while Whishaw was too humble to actually give her advice, she learned a lot from watching him work. “I believe that when you are number one on the call sheet you’ve got a responsibility,” she says. “If you are, as a lead actor, having a bad day and treating people terribly, that’s just going to make the whole culture toxic.”
Besides Whishaw, Mod also looks up to actors like Margot Robbie, who produces as well as acts, and Emma Stone, both for her comedy chops and her willingness to take on wild new characters. Going forward, Mod would like to do more comedy and to write, but she’s in no rush, wanting most of all to be deliberate in her creative decisions—to take things one day at a time.
Hair, Carlos Ferras; makeup, Anna Inglis Hall; stylist, Farrah O’Connor.