MOD OF STONE
Bullies called me ugly… One Day role was validating but seeing myself on screen fed into insecurities, says Ambika Mod
Despite her achievements, Ambika still lacks some confidence
IT has taken many years but actress Ambika Mod can finally laugh about the school bully boys who left her with insecurities about her looks.
And it is thanks to both her starring role as Emma Morley in romantic Netflix drama One Day and finding love with fellow actor Andy Sellers.
6
6
The 28-year-old actress said: “I had a bad experience with boys at high school.
They’d come up to me, quite regularly, and say, ‘You’re really ugly’. St like that.
“That does still inform a lot of who I am. So I guess that being cast as the romantic lead in a big TV show is pretty validating.
“If I were in my villain era I’d be cackling, ‘I proved you wrong!’.”
READ MORE CELEB NEWS
She certainly has.
One Day follows university friends, Northern working-class Emma and posh Southern boy Dexter Mayhew, over 20 years and revisits their relationship every July 15.
It has already been downloaded 15.2million times since its release on February 8.
The sizzling chemistry between Ambika and co-star Leo Woodall, 27, has led to critical acclaim.
Most read in News TV
In one interview, Ambika said: “I do relate to Emma. We’re both hard grafters, people on the outskirts.
“Emma’s spent three years at the same uni as Dexter and he hasn’t really noticed her.
Death row inmate Ivan Cantu’s final words after Kim Kardashian’s and other celeb bids to save him from execution failed
“I was also a bit of a wallflower growing up. I wasn’t invited to parties and I never won a school prize.”
Ambika admits she became “anxious” in her late teens.
‘Do people fall in love with someone like me?’
On the podcast Reign with Josh Smith, she said: “I’m someone who is incredibly anxious and I have struggled with depression in the past.”
She added: “I know what it feels like to go through a day where nothing is sparking joy and you just feel really hopeless and a bit futile for the future and all you’re living in is self-doubt and self-criticism.”
Despite her career, Ambika still lacks confidence.
She said: “I have impostor syndrome. I think I’m really boring and nobody wants to be around me.
“Seeing yourself on screen feeds into insecurities about how you look and how valued you are in society, how beautiful you feel — do people fall in love with someone who looks like me?
“There’s so much insidious messaging that comes with your face and people who look like you not being front and centre. I hope now that’s changing.
“I feel like I’ve got to be the smartest, funniest person in the room because my looks aren’t going to get me anywhere.
“It’s weird doing this job because you are cons-tantly aware of what you look like.”
But she has found love with actor boyfriend Andy, 30, who has starred in the Yorkshire series All Creatures Great And Small playing a young Siegfried Farnon, and who will be seen in film Young Woman And The Sea alongside Daisy Ridley and Lily James, out in May.
6
6
Ambika and Andy, who is currently filming upcoming psychological thriller series Playdate for Disney+, live in Camberwell, South London, with their mini bernedoodle dog Toddy.
The actress grew up in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, with her younger sister Priya and their parents, who are both Indian immigrants.
Her mother, an accountant, arrived in the UK as a child and her father, a vet, followed when he was in his twenties.
Although Ambika loved watching Bollywood movies when she was a youngster, she actually dreamt of being a comedian.
When Covid hit and my live comedy went away
She said: “My parents made it very clear that, no, that’s not going to happen. They said, ‘You can do it as an extracurricular activity, you can do it at school, but not as a career’.”
While studying English at Durham University she became president of the college’s comedy group and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
After graduating, Ambika moved to London and worked in the stock department at John Lewis and as a PA at a publishing house while performing stand-up routines in the evenings.
But she said: “When Covid hit and my live comedy went away, I began to figure out what it was I wanted to do. I started doing acting classes because I thought, ‘If I’m not working I might as well try to get better at that’.”
She landed small acting roles in The Mash Report, I Hate Suzie and Pet Name.
But her big break came in the 2022 BBC medical drama This Is Going To Hurt playing Shruti Acharya, an overworked junior doctor who ends her life after suffering a mental health crisis due to mounting pressure in the NHS and her studies.
Big break
After its release, Ambika was offered an audition for the part of Emma in the drama One Day, based on David Nicholls’ best-selling book, but initially turned it down, thinking it would be a waste of time.
She said: “I just didn’t see myself playing that part because, insidiously and implicitly, that’s a message that I’ve been fed my entire life — that people who look like me aren’t romantic leads. That people who look like me aren’t the people who the male romantic lead will fall in love with.”
Ambika admits she was feeling overwhelmed, adding: “I was being an idiot thinking it wasn’t for me.
“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’.”
Thankfully, a month later, she woke up in the middle of the night and realised she had made a huge mistake.
She called her agent first thing the following morning determined to try for the role.
‘I was ready, I wanted to push myself’
Ambika explained: “I was just ready for the challenge. I wanted to push myself.
“This was by far the best opportunity and I just love the character and the book. I feel I’ve manifested my 13-year-old dream, so it felt quite magical.”
In the 2011 film of the book, Emma was played by Hollywood superstar Anne Hathaway, 41, who was widely criticised for her unconvincing Northern accent.
Ambika vowed not to make the same mistake and said she mastered the accent in two days by binge-watching old episodes of the documentary Educating Yorkshire.
She said: “It was quite a lot to wrap your mouth around. It feels like a massive achievement.”
It just sort of happened very quickly and naturally
As well as helping her become a household name, One Day has also led to an amazing friendship with her co-star Leo, who played Jack in White Lotus alongside his girlfriend Meghann Fahy, 33, who was Daphne.
Explaining their first meeting, Ambika said: “I think we met up for coffee, which then turned into a gin and tonic around lunchtime, the day before we went into pre-production, just to kind of have a natter.
“We ended up getting bevs on the South Bank in London and that was the first time we’d been together one on one. Then we were just straight into it, and we were basically spending all day, every day together.
“We got to the point where we were living in each other’s pockets because eight months of filming is a really long time. It just sort of happened very quickly and naturally.”
And during filming they were always there to support each other when the nerves set in.
She said: “We were both really open when we were struggling, when we didn’t feel like things were right.
“I remember, maybe I was more vocal about it than him, but I would come out of every scene being like, ‘Oh, I’m a f**ing st actor, I should f***ing quit right now’.”
Read More on The Sun
Thankfully she did not — and she has received much praise for her portrayal of Emma.
And after the staggering number of streams of One Day, she has proved the bullies wrong.
6
6
Topics