‘I was an idiot!’ Ambika Mod on nearly turning down the romcom role of a lifetime

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 visits 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.”

Mod is perfect: she captures Emma’s loyalty and hard-done-by air, and the way she uses humour as a defence mechanism. Watching it made me ache for the 90s and the possibilities of youth. Emma is a northerner, trying to make it in London as a writer; Dexter, powered by the charm and confidence of his social class, seemingly skips through life, at least at the start. In Emma’s feeling as an outsider, says Mod, “there’s so much to identify of myself in her, especially when I started out in this industry”.

The other day a friend described her as a serious actor, which surprised Mod, whose career has until recently been in comedy. “I still don’t think of myself as an actor. I sort of fell into it accidentally.” She grew up in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, the daughter of an accountant and a vet. She wasn’t the kind of kid who put on shows, and she never got cast in anything at secondary school. “I’m not a performative, extroverted type at all. I’m still quite shy and introverted, but I don’t think that’s mutually exclusive from wanting to perform.”

At Durham University, after failing to get parts in plays, she instead joined its comedy group, the Durham Revue, which she ended up running in her final year. “Writing and performing comedy is never something I thought I would do, but I didn’t really have anything else, and I happened to be good at it. Also, I remember the first time I did a sketch on stage, I was like: ‘Oh, making people laugh is the best feeling in the world.’ There really is no substitute for it. There’s something about being on stage and hearing that laughter, this visceral response you’ve created in somebody, that is what I love and crave.” She smiles at herself. “And seek for validation.”

After university, Mod moved to London and got jobs – she worked in the stock department at John Lewis for a while, and at the publishing house Condé Nast as a PA – while performing standup in the evenings. She would write with her comedy partner, Andrew Shires, at the weekends, including shows they would take to the Edinburgh fringe. One, Children of the Quorn, was based around a seance, with sketches woven in – random, slapstick and silly – including one about a failing Simon and Garfunkel cover band, and another inspired by Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.

For a couple of years, progress seemed slow and frustrating “and that felt like a massive fail”. But in 2019 things started to pick up – their comedy duo, named Megan from HR, was getting attention and good reviews, Mod got an agent and did a few small acting jobs, and then This Is Going to Hurt came along. Mod played a junior doctor struggling with her mental health and, despite having very little acting experience and no training, was a revelation. Comedy, she thinks, and the experience of occasionally dying on stage, gave her a confidence to try things out, not be too self-conscious, but she still suffered impostor syndrome. “I massively felt like I didn’t belong there, I didn’t know what acting was or how to act, or what I should be doing. But my philosophy was just do everything and you’ll figure out what works for you.”

As a child, Mod watched almost exclusively Bollywood movies but when she got older, drawn to more British and US TV, she started noticing that there weren’t many roles for women of south Asian heritage on screen. After This Is Going to Hurt, lots of opportunities were coming her way, but it also felt, she says, “like there was a ceiling because I am a young, brown woman. I often wonder what kind of parts would have come to me if I had that same sort of breakout role and if I’d been white, and there were just more opportunities out there for me.” Quality, too, has been an issue. “I do occasionally get asked to [audition for] the best friend role to a white lead,” she says. “While I’m really grateful for the opportunities I am getting, I’m learning to stand up for what I think I deserve, and what I’ve proven of myself. I have to honour that by not settling for things I don’t think my white counterparts would be offered.”

When she gets recognised in the street or contacted on social media, it’s almost always by young women of south Asian heritage. “That says so much. My image represents so many people who haven’t seen themselves on TV. If I can be that to a young south Asian girl, even if she doesn’t want to be an actor, but she sees One Day, and thinks: ‘I’m worthy of love, I’m worthy of achieving my dreams,’ what an amazing thing to give someone.”

Mod had role models when she was growing up – Mindy Kaling, the US comedian and writer especially – but it would have helped to have more. “When I was a teenager, there wasn’t the same discussion we have now about representation and why it matters. I’ve always had a difficult relationship with my physical appearance and I think a lot of that is being told, specifically or implicitly, that brown women aren’t the standard of beauty. That’s quite insidious, [and] gets fed to you by way of not seeing yourself on screen – that is very specific to young women of colour. It still sits with me. I remember when I got One Day I was like: ‘What business do I have playing a romantic lead?’” She is, for the record, a wonderful romantic lead – warm, empathetic, someone you want to succeed, and the chemistry between the leads makes their 20-year relationship completely believable.

In One Day, Emma and Dexter’s student conversation about what they imagine their lives to be at 40, as if it’s some far-off age, is alarming for anyone past that milestone. What does Mod, who is 28, hope to be doing at 40? She reminds me with a laugh that she currently can’t see past February, when the show comes out. But playing Emma, subtly aged for the older version, must have made her think about the trajectory of her own life? Yes, she says. “I think when you’re young, it’s about all the big things – changing the world and having an impact, having an amazing career and finding the love of your life. And as you get older, without wanting to sound like a cliche, life is so much in the small moments. I’m very lucky and thankful that I’ve had the success I’ve had so far, but it doesn’t fill you up. You get to an age and you look back and realise how the smallest things, over years later, have impacted your life in the most profound ways – ways you would never have expected. I think that’s really beautiful.” She catches herself and laughs. “Ah, so wanky.”

She hopes that in the future, she says, “I’m still doing things that excite me”. She has such a raw acting talent and a beautiful, expressive face, I’d watch her in anything. She’d like to get back to comedy, “to go back to writing and focus on doing my own thing and finding my own voice again”. Forty doesn’t seem scary – she has worked with a lot of older women, and has been inspired by their confidence. “I’m looking forward to that aspect of things, because I care way too much what people think of me right now. I can’t wait to, hopefully, get to a point where I don’t feel that any more.”

One Day is on Netflix from 8 February.