Leo Woodall is awed by viewers’ emotional reactions to the Netflix romance about friends turned lovers, though his attention is already on his next projects.

Story by Yvonne Villarreal
Photograph by Jennifer McCord For The Times

I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS ONE specifically,” Leo Woodall says as a sheepish smile — the one that has made hearts flutter since Netflix dropped its adaptation of the angsty romantic drama “One Day,” in which he stars — stretches across his face.

Woodall is well aware there is a trove of TikTok videos that document viewers’ intensely emotional response to the series, which chronicles the 20-year torturous slow burn of unlikely friends Dex (Woodall) and Emma (Ambika Mod). His friends have passed some on, he says. But after pleasantries are exchanged at the start of this video call on a mid-May morning — with Woodall beaming in from London — I share my screen to guide him through a TikTok sampler of heartache.

There’s a young woman, draped in a green blanket, in various states of complete anguish. Another video is a close-up shot of a young woman wiping tears from her face while watching an early interaction between Dex and Emma with the caption: “Me 2 days later still crying watching edits.” The final video features a viewer who has just completed the series, camera turned to her face as she lies in utter despair against a pillow. One by one, Woodall lets out an “Oh, noooo!” as he watches.

“In the beginning, when the show came out, I was trying to keep up with some of the reactions to it,” he adds. “I was just very intrigued and anxious to know what people thought and how they were responding to it — if they responded to it at all.

But there’s something cathartic and therapeutic about it. Everyone needs a good cry. We spend a lot of our time watching things, and you don’t always have a real, emotional reaction.”

It’s also helped the actor’s rising profile, taking him from a virtual unknown to an international heartthrob. After a key supporting turn in the sophomore season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” playing the supposed nephew of a gay man trying to scam Jennifer Coolidge’s wealthy character, the 27-year-old actor sent the internet into emotional freefall in February with the launch of the adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestselling novel. In the melancholic, angst-ridden friends-to-lovers tale — previously adapted for the big screen in 2011 with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess — Woodall’s Dexter is privileged and charismatic but emotionally tortured as the series chronicles his evolving friendship with his witty and stubborn BFF across two decades on the same day.

Not that Woodall has had much time to make sense of the attention. He quickly began production in Budapest, Hungary, on the Nazi drama “Nuremberg,” a film whose cast includes Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon and Rami Malek. With that now wrapped, he’s begun work on the fourth installment of “Bridget Jones’s Diary” opposite Renée Zellweger.

Although Woodall comes from a family of actors — his parents met at drama school and he is a descendant of silent film star Maxine Elliott — he hadn’t always dreamed of pursuing the life. He thought maybe something sporty was in his cards. Then he discovered a couple key series and the curiosity kicked in.

“I remember I was in a gap year, working in a bar, not doing anything of great worth for my future, and I started just thinking about it,” he says. “It was a few things: It was ‘Peaky Blinders,’ also ‘Skins.’ I watched the two seasons that Jack O’Connell was in. I remember seeing his character and being like, ‘Whoa, that’s fun. Whatever he’s doing, that’s cool.’ I started looking into his road to playing that character. And yeah, watching ‘Peaky Blinders’ and just felt like doing a Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) impression in the mirror. [Laughs] It’s so embarrassing. I would start improvising in the world of ‘Peaky Blinders.’ ”

Woodall graduated in 2019 from Arts Educational School, where he studied acting, before landing minor roles in such TV shows as “Vampire Academy” and “Citadel.” He was filming “The White Lotus” when he watched the film version of “One Day” as prep work for his audition: “I didn’t know how it was gonna end,” he says. “And I remember I was in my kitchen cooking something, and I turned my eyes away for a second and I look back and Emma had been hit. And I was like, ‘What the f—?

How could you do us like that?!’ ” It added to his intrigue of, as he describes it, “a love story that wasn’t really just a romantic story. It’s about these two people who grow up together, and also apart. It’s about their friendship more than it is about, ‘Are they gonna get together?’ I know that is a huge part of it, but you do just see a real friendship.” Then there’s the complexity of Dex’s journey.

“One Day” returns to Emma (Ambika Mod) and Dex (Leo Woodall) on the same day annually for 20 years.

“He’s unbelievably fragile and vulnerable,” he says. “I think there’s a perception of him — not just from the people within the world of the story but people who have now seen the show — that he’s got kind of a reputation and you learn as you go on that he’s very insecure, he’s lonely a lot of the time. He just wants to be connected to the people that he cares about. He gets in his own way a lot of the time. But truthfully, he’s just someone who has a big, big heart. And it gets broken more than once.”

Woodall humbly scoffs when asked what he’s learned about what goes into playing a leading man — “Oh, I still don’t know. Honestly, there’s so many things to figure out still.” But he’s enthusiastic about this chapter in his story.

“I’ve been away from home for a very long time,” he says. “And that can have its effects on your happiness. So I’m back in London now, and I’m very happy to see all my people and still work. That’s the game of acting, you just never know. There is a momentum that exists.”