Leo Woodall stays grounded after ‘One Day,’ even as more hearts are fluttering

“I haven’t seen this one specifically,” Leo Woodall says as a sheepish smile — the one that has made a fair number of 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 that has been recorded.

He lets out an enthusiastic chuckle as he braces for impact.

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 a guilty whimper or “Oh, noooo!” as he screens them.

“We could watch these all day,” Woodall says as the brief presentation nears its end.

“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. And I think the show really succeeded in lancing its way into people’s hearts.”

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 alleged “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.

“There’s definitely a kind of projection that people put on you,” he says. “I myself have done it with actors that I’ve watched. It’s just a natural thing that you do. Being on the other end of it was kind of a strange feeling. You just can’t take it too seriously. You have to find it funny and just get on with your life a little bit. Giving it too much attention is not something I would want to do. It’s just a funny part of life now.”

Not that Woodall has had much time to make sense of the attention. Soon after “One Day” premiered, he took a breather from Instagram: “My followers were going up and up, and I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’ But then I was like, I’m going to put my phone away.” He also 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 life as a performer. He thought maybe something sporty was in his cards. Then he discovered “Peaky Blinders” and “Skins,” and the curiosity kicked in.

“I just remember I was in a gap year, working in a bar, not doing anything of great worth for my future, and I guess I started just kind of 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 how he got to where he was and 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] I had the hat, and I was like, ‘Screw it, no one is looking. I’ll just do it.’ It’s so embarrassing. I would start improvising in the world of ‘Peaky Blinders.’”

He 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.

“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. The very beginning of shooting, I didn’t exactly know which foot to put forward. Then I was like, ‘Just do your job and be nice.’” But he’s enthusiastic about this chapter in his story.

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