Everybody's in Love With Leo Woodall
English actor on playing Renée Zellweger's love interest, his favorite rom-coms, that sex scene with Tom Hollander, playing Dex in 'One Day,' and more
Leo Woodall was four years old in 2001, when Renée Zellweger charmed global audiences as the titular hapless romantic of Bridget Jones’s Diary. The film, which earned Zellweger her first Oscar nomination, became regular viewing for the London-born actor and his family at Christmas time each year. But he never could have imagined at the time that he would one day be playing Zellweger’s love interest in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth and final installment of the franchise based on Helen Fielding’s novels.
“Bridget Jones is one of those things that I grew up with,” Woodall says on a video call the morning after the film’s New York premiere, clad in a gold-lined Ralph Lauren bomber. “Lots of people have loved it. She’s a character that has made a bunch of people feel seen. And for me, it was a really exciting, wonderful experience to get to join it.”
Consider it one of many exciting, wonderful experiences in Woodall’s young career, a whirlwind that’s taken the 28-year-old actor from a breakout role on Season Two of The White Lotus to a co-starring part in the limited series One Day, and a rom-com lead opposite an Oscar winner in just three short years. The job comes with its perks, or burdens, depending how you look at it. Just days before Mad About the Boy’s New York premiere, the cast was premiering the film in Sydney. When I ask how Woodall is feeling, he confesses with a smile to being jet-lagged, but brushes off the sleep deprivation as a worthy tradeoff for his recent success. “I’ve been incredibly lucky the last couple years, and I don’t even [say] that in any way self-deprecating,” Woodall says. “It’s just part of this business. You get these lucky breaks.”
Woodall calls Bridget Jones a character “that makes people feel seen.” Alex Bailey/Universal PicturesIt’s no accident that Woodall has struck gold as a heartthrob. Soft-spoken with laugh lines and a glint in his saucer-sized blue eyes, his appeal is universal. In The White Lotus, he brought an undercurrent of sexy seediness to Jack, a cocky party boy who charms Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) while privately performing sexual favors for the so-called uncle, played by Tom Hollander, who brought him on a trip to Sicily. As the trauma-burdened Dex in the tearjerking romantic drama One Day, he hit a more earnest and forlorn note. And in Mad About the Boy (out now), he channels a childlike innocence as park ranger Roxster, who ignites a relationship with 51-year-old Bridget, now widowed and a mother of two.
Woodall swears he hasn’t intentionally shaped his career around attachment-avoidant heartbreakers, but he seems to be enjoying this accidental path. And as a fan of rom-coms — he mentions the London-set Notting Hill as another favorite — he’s not against doing more of them. “My experience of doing Bridget was just so joyous and fun, and I want to experience more of that,” he says.
Born the youngest of three in Shepherd’s Bush, London, Woodall was raised in a household of entertainers: His father is an actor and his mother studied theater. But as a kid, acting wasn’t his dream. Instead, he hoped to teach phys ed — until he realized, “you need seriously good grades to be a P.E. teacher. You have to know all the science behind physicality, and I sucked at science.”With the support of his parents, he enrolled in London’s Arts Education Schools. After graduating in 2019, he landed minor roles in the medical drama Holby City, the Tom Holland-led crime film Cherry, and then The White Lotus, which thrust him into the spotlight. He says he wouldn’t change anything about that eye-catching role, including a sex scene with Hollander that went viral.
“It’s a fucking iconic scene,” he says. “I love Tom, and we really just had a laugh that day. I knew when I first heard about it, that it was gonna shock people, and I couldn’t wait to see people’s faces.”
One Day’s Dex required a very different kind of vulnerability, as the character deals with alcohol abuse, the death of his mother, and the death of his longtime love interest over the nearly 20-year period the story covers. (“When I was first introduced to him, I just wanted to give him a big hug and tell him that everything was going to be alright,” Woodall says.) The project was so emotionally grueling, Woodall says that when filming concluded in Paris, he and his brother roamed the city, popping into museums to help himself mentally reset.
“There was a lot of stuff that required me to suffer a little bit, but it was also cathartic,” he says. “It was very fulfilling to do that.”
With Ambika Mod as Emma in One Day. Teddy Cavendish/NetflixIt was Woodall’s ability to conjure “nuanced emotional complexity” within that narcissistic yet troubled character that surprised Luke Snellin, who directed four episodes of One Day. “He’s a sensitive, emotionally intelligent person,” Snellin says of Woodall, “but at the same time, it seems like he takes those moments and performs those moments in his stride.”
Transitioning to the playful if immature Roxster in Mad About the Boy was a breath of fresh air for Woodall. Director Michael Morris says Woodall was on his shortlist for the role. So when the actor entered the audition, the casting directors treated it like a rehearsal run, handing him a script that delved into garbology (the study of garbage), trash-diving, and dissolvable plastics. What was supposed to be a 10-minute audition for the role carried on for half an hour. “It made him this real scientist, and it had to still be flirtatious,” Morris says. “It had to still end up with [him telling Bridget] ‘I’m into you,’ and Leo bloody killed it.
“I wanted someone who would appeal right off the bat without working too hard to appeal to you,” Morris adds, “and that’s Leo.”
The audience first meets Roxster when he rescues Bridget and her two kids from an oak tree, a scene Woodall recalls fondly, as he got to share the screen not just with Zellweger but with one of his idols in co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays a science teacher who happened to be on a park jog. “We only exchanged like, three lines, but, it meant a lot to me,” he says.
From there, a rose-colored romance between Roxster and Bridget ensues: They spend hours texting, attend a drive-in, and sleep together. In another rescue scene, Woodall dives into a pool fully clothed to save a dog. It was a sweltering hot London day that involved a stunt team, underwater cameras, and industrial hair dryers. “He was a really good sport,” Morris says of Woodall. Fielding often drew inspiration from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in the Bridget Jones novels, so the scene also pays tribute to the BBC’s adaptation of that story, where Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy — analog to Firth’s Mark Darcy in the first three Jones movies — steps out of a lake in a clinging wet shirt.
Mad About the Boy joins several recent projects that have centered on age-gap romances where the woman is the much older partner in the pair: Babygirl, The Idea of You, A Family Affair. To Woodall, any fuss about the topic is overblown. “I think going forward that we’ll probably see a lot more of these dynamics, and people will get used to it, and it won’t be this kind of novelty or taboo,” he says.Next up, Woodall will turn his bedroom eyes and seductive smile to less romantic roles, starring opposite Russell Crowe in the war drama Nuremberg and Dustin Hoffman in the crime thriller Turner. Inspired by shows like Peaky Blinders and Skins, he is eager to test the full range of his skills. It was Skins antihero James Cook, played by Jack O’Connell, he says, that set off his interest in acting. “He was so electric that it made me wonder, what would [it] be like to do that,” he adds. We’re lucky he saw it through.
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