“I wish she hadn’t entered our lives,” my partner Danny complains from next to me on the couch, our knees touching for comfort. We’ve just finished binge-rewatching This Is Going to Hurt (2022) and One Day (2024) as self-assigned homework in preparation for my interview with Ambika Mod. Danny is an emotional wreck after that brutal one-two by Shruti Acharya and Emma Morley, walking around our London flat wide-eyed and sad. One Day hit a lot harder on our second viewing because we had a health scare this year, assuming the worst till the reports came back normal.
I say none of this to Mod when she springs to life on screen with a singsong hello. This feels like a first date, and I don’t want to trauma-dump. The actor is wearing a white tank top, no obvious signs of makeup, hair how it’s meant to be on a Friday afternoon, casually falling over one shoulder. She’s dialling in from Bavaria where she’s working on a new project. “I’m in a place called Regensburg, which is fine.” Mod’s just being British by describing an entire city as “fine”, and because I am one in the making, I ask her how the weather is. “Actually alright, it’s warm but not sunny,” she says, looking out the window. “I’ve got a nice view of the river; I’ve got an apartment with its own private sauna. I haven’t used it yet, but I will,” she says. Maybe as a treat for her birthday, which is right around the corner.
One Day, which traces the relationship between Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) and Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) over the course of two decades, spent seven consecutive weeks on Netflix’s list of the top 10 global English shows.
Matt Towers, © 2022 Netflix, Inc.
“I’ll be 31. Thirty is, like, ‘adult but still young and sexy’. As a teenager,” Mod recalls, “I always had this resolve that this isn’t my place right now; this is not where I’m thriving. I was a wallflower at school, but I knew what I wanted and that my time would come. Thirty-one, though, feels pretty damning,” she says, sighing dramatically. Then she laughs, and I know that she knows she’s where she wants to be. Since One Day dropped in February 2024 and spent seven consecutive weeks on Netflix’s list of the top 10 global English shows, Mod has made her Met Gala debut with Loewe and appeared in a campaign for the luxury brand in the same year, featured in one of six cinematic readings of actors performing extracts from the International Booker Prize 2025 shortlist, and fronted two critically acclaimed stage productions: Porn Play, about an academic addicted to violent pornography, and Every Brilliant Thing, centred on a child trying to ferry their mother through depression. In her most recent outings, she plays Daughter Earth to Charli xcx’s Mother Earth in Romain Gavras’s celebrity-stuffed eco-satire Sacrifice, and secret agent Laila Joshi on season 2 of Black Doves, both streaming on Netflix.
