My favourite performance by the actor Leo Woodall is the one he’s doing right now in front of me using only his face. It could be from the silent-movie era. And it tells the story of how he got the part that made him a star, Jack in The White Lotus. It’s 2021. He’s a 25-year-old wannabe with a bit part in the BBC’s Holby City under his belt. But Woodall blows away Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, with his iPhone audition video for the second season. Jack is a charismatic tearaway loosely based on Joey Essex from Channel 4’s The Only Way Is Essex.
Woodall is duly cast and sent the script. This is it. His big break. He learns more about his character and all is well until he reads episode five. And there’s Jack enjoying vigorous anal sex with his Uncle Quentin, played by Tom Hollander.
Woodall’s response? Ten seconds of total silence. Finally, after a hard swallow, “I just go, ‘Yeah, great. I think that works really well.’ ”
Woodall tells a great story. I cannot stop laughing. Talk about a baptism of fire.
“To be honest, I was very confused and shocked at first. And then I burst out laughing because I just thought, this is your big chance. So what if you have to get it on with Tom Hollander? He’s a fantastic actor. You’ve got to have a sense of humour about these things.”
Woodall as Jack with Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) in The White Lotus
HBO
You will also recall from the second White Lotus — the one set in Sicily, often cited as the best — that Woodall stole the show. And hot, conflicted yob Jack was no fluke. Woodall quickly followed it up with hot, charismatic yet broken Dexter in the 2024 Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls’ blockbuster novel One Day, then claimed a hat trick with his hot, commitment-phobe park keeper Roxster in this year’s Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
Even on a drizzly grey London morning, Woodall emits unmistakable leading man energy. The limpid blue eyes. The 6ft 1in frame filling an armchair. He’s still wearing the silver neck chain Jack wore in The White Lotus and sees me admiring it.
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“Do you think it’s a bit weird I’m wearing it?” he asks. “I actually got it before the role.”
Despite his success, there’s still an artless openness to Woodall. Not only does he ask what I think about the chain, he wants to know if I think justice will be served in the final of The Celebrity Traitors. Then he offers to organise some coffee for me.
Maybe that’s part of what makes him a millennial pin-up: the movie-star looks belie someone easy-going and sensitive, maybe even a bit bumbling. I can see how the White Lotus audition invitation sat in his email inbox for two weeks (Woodall didn’t even notice it and nearly missed out). But you pick up on that twinkly tearaway aspect to him too: Woodall also lied about having a driving licence, which led to complications when his role required him to skid a car.
“I’ve learnt accents, maths [for the Apple TV+ drama Prime Target], German and piano for various roles. I’m always having to learn a new skill, so I just thought, ‘Driving? Yeah, I can do that.’ ”
I think people are long past caring if Woodall knows the Highway Code. In just three years he has emerged as a highly bankable star. On this side of the Atlantic his closest rival in the complex leading man stakes is another 29-year-old chain-wearing icon, Paul Mescal, who made his name in the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
“Normal People is a f***ing masterpiece,” Woodall asserts. “Paul, Daisy [Edgar-Jones], all of it. To be mentioned in the same breath as Paul is an honour and I’d love to work with him.”
He and Mescal have met and Woodall has affectionately chided the Irishman for grabbing roles he’d like to do. For example, in 2023 Mescal won an Olivier award for his West End theatre debut as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.
“I played Stanley at drama school and loved it,” Woodall says. “Then Paul did it and I was like, ‘F***.’ And then he won an Olivier award and I was, ‘Damn.’ But are we competing for the same roles? I bet you anything Paul is getting offered things before I am.”
But what makes a leading man in 2025? After MeToo, it’s complex.
In the most recent Bridget Jones film, Woodall was served up as part of a whole buffet of masculine tropes. Would Bridget fall for the kind yet emotionally constipated teacher Mr Walliker (Chiwetel Ejiofor) or pine for taciturn, principled (and actually dead) Mark Darcy (Colin Firth)? Or would she go dark and choose Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the chiselled, superposh rogue dating 30 years younger than himself, who has Jones in his smartphone contacts as “Dirty Bitch”?
Enter Woodall as Roxster, the dreamy-eyed 29-year-old responding to 51-year-old Bridget’s dating app profile (“Tragic Widow seeks sexual awakening”).
This “cougar” dynamic caused much online debate, but I also know many women had no problem with it. Especially when Woodall dived into a swimming pool, got soaking wet and then took his shirt off, all while rescuing a dog.
With Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy earlier this year
ALAMY
Woodall and Ambika Mod in One Day, 2024
TEDDY CAVENDISH/NETFLIX
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Did Woodall mind being objectified?
“After One Day, I thought maybe I wouldn’t do another romantic drama unless it was something different. But then Bridget Jones came along and it was different. I love that film. I love what Rénee Zellweger does with the character and the story is interesting, witty and it’s telling a truth: you never know who you’re going to fall in love with.”
But you have mentioned feeling vulnerable about being objectified in the past…
“Yes. Being objectified can mess with your head a bit. But just being an actor and getting treated as if you’re superimportant is hard to navigate. I’m not saving lives, am I? Bonkers stuff like people you don’t know screaming your name, saying they love you and want to marry you. You cannot let that noise — good or bad — get in your head, otherwise you become…”
Become what?
“A knobhead.”
In 2022, on the set of The White Lotus, Woodall fell in love with fellow cast member Meghann Fahy, the American actress who played ditzy housewife Daphne Sullivan. He is generally very tight-lipped about their relationship, but does she keep him in line?
“Oh yeah, we do it for each other,” he says. “You have to. And family, friends… The people around you day to day, they have to be real with you.”
Woodall with his partner Meghann Fahy, whom he met while working on The White Lotus
GETTY IMAGES
Woodall has another weapon dating back to what he has called the “dark years”. He grew up in Shepherd’s Bush in west London, the youngest of three children (he has a brother, Gabriel, and a sister, Constance). His parents are divorced and in his early teens he says he was “acting out”.
“I was in trouble at school; I didn’t give a f***. I shaved my head, had notches cut in my eyebrows and I even had a bit of a street name someone gave me [it was ‘something kid’]. Embarrassing, but then everyone is a bit embarrassing when they’re a teenager, aren’t they?”
He was smoking a lot of weed and, frankly, wasting a lot of time. That is until he ended up in therapy.
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“I started it years prior to having any kind of public profile. I think everyone should do it. It was helpful when my life started to change, otherwise I might have gone loopy.”
But why did he feel the need for therapy so young?
“I was lost,” he says. “I mean, every teenager has good and bad moments, don’t they?”
Woodall is from a minor acting dynasty. His father, Andrew Woodall, is an actor (he was an Imperial recruitment officer in Solo: A Star Wars Story), as is his stepfather, Alexander Morton (he was the ghillie Golly Mackenzie in the BBC drama Monarch of the Glen).
Woodall’s mother, Jane, also attended drama school, but didn’t pursue her career. In fact, Woodall can trace thespian roots all the way back to a silent-film actress called Maxine Elliott, who reputedly had a relationship with King Edward VII.
It was after getting a couple of A-levels (he passed PE and film studies but flunked philosophy) and folding clothes in a branch of Hollister that the acting gene was switched on for Woodall too.
Inspired by Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders and Jack O’Connell in the Channel 4 youth drama Skins (the show that also launched Dev Patel, Daniel Kaluuya and Nicholas Hoult), he enrolled at the west London drama school ArtsEd.
“I had a Peaky Blinders flat cap at home but my dad and so many others said, ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t be a f***ing actor,’ ” he says. “I guess they said it as a warning, but it made me really nervous about telling them I wanted to try.”
Keira Knightley recently admitted to an interviewer that she considers herself a nepo baby (her mother is a playwright, her father an actor). Is Woodall one?
“I would own it if it were true. I think I definitely benefited from advice or just having the experiences to share with members of my family, but in terms of opportunities, no disrespect to my family, I didn’t get any extra leg up. I’m not saying I didn’t get superlucky, because I did, but I give total credit for that to the genius that is Mike White.”
Woodall leaves his own talent out of the equation. No two ways about it, it’s not just his looks; he fully inhabits his roles. David Nicholls, the author of One Day, has compared his ability to communicate vulnerability even when being “unbearable” to the likes of Robert Redford and Ryan Gosling.
“Oh, thank you very much,” Woodall says when I mention it, almost as if I’ve just passed him a mug of tea or opened a door for him.
But how is he handling it all? Woodall can still just about travel on London Underground. Two days ago it was fine. The time before, not.
“When it’s hot and sweaty and I realise people are looking at me, I find that hard. I mean, is it because they liked something I was in, or have I just got something on my face?”
He tells me about a horrible experience he had at the Toronto Film Festival a couple of months ago. Woodall had two movies showing and flew out his mum and dad for the occasion. One lunchtime in a restaurant, he and his mum were having a heart to heart. He won’t say what it was about, but she was crying.
“This woman came over and said, ‘I can see that you guys are having a really emotional moment and I hate to do this, but can I get a picture?’ ” he says, taking up the story. Woodall obliged, but at the same time he was trying to shield his mum’s tears.
“But she saw and was peeking over my shoulder going, ‘Are you OK? You must be really proud of your son.’ I mean, some people forget themselves. They forget you’re just human.”
Alongside Dustin Hoffman in Tuner, due next year
ALAMY
But there are nice moments too. One of the films shown at Toronto was Tuner (it’s about a piano tuner who can crack safes, out next year), starring Woodall and Dustin Hoffman. For boomers like Woodall’s dad, Hoffman’s performances in Kramer vs Kramer and All the President’s Men make him a bona fide legend. Andrew Woodall was still blown away when he got to meet him.
“My dad was like, ‘My boy’s in a movie with Dustin Hoffman!’ It’s so nice. I mean, they’re not used to that level of profile yet. But you don’t necessarily want to get used to it. That’s what makes it magic.”
Woodall has held on to that innocence too. He was overwhelmed in New York when he met his heroes, the actors Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad. He spotted them in a hotel bar and was too shy to say hello. But as he left, Paul waved him over and said, “Keep crushing it, man.” Woodall had to lie down in his hotel room to recover.
Even more touching was his encounter with Leonardo DiCaprio, to whom he is often compared. The pair met briefly at a Baftas party in Los Angeles in 2024.
“He was just leaving and we passed each other in the hallway. I felt I had to say something but all I could come up with was, ‘Hey, we have the same name.’ He just looked at me, said, ‘Cool,’ and walked past. I mean, I hope he doesn’t remember that and I get a second chance to say hello, because the roles he chooses, the way he takes his career in different directions, that’s a total inspiration to someone like me.”
Woodall is doing something different. He is about to appear with Russell Crowe and Rami Malek in Nuremberg, a dramatisation of the true-life encounter between the US Army psychologist Lt Col Douglas Kelley and Adolf Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goering, during the war trials that began 80 years ago. It was Kelley’s job to assess whether Goering and other senior Nazis were fit to stand trial. Crowe’s Goering is a portrait in lugubrious porcine arrogance while Malek’s Kelley twitches with nervous ambition (Kelley hoped to establish a common psychological trait that would explain Nazi evil, and then write a book about it). Meanwhile, Woodall plays Howard Triest, a German-speaking Jew who worked as a translator and, if anything, his story is extraordinary enough to warrant a film by itself.
Hailing from Munich, the Triest family fled to Luxembourg the day before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. They planned to continue to the US but, short of money, sent 16-year-old Howard ahead alone. He made it to New York, but the rest of the family were detained in France and his parents were eventually murdered at Auschwitz.
Three years after arriving in the US, Triest was finally allowed to join the army (initially he was rejected because he was German) and he landed in Normandy shortly after D-Day. Speaking German quickly made him a valuable asset as the Allies captured the fleeing German high command.
Triest found himself translating not only for the captured Goering but also Rudolf Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz and the man responsible for murdering his family. Triest won the trust of many Nazi prisoners (especially Julius Streicher, editor of the antisemitic magazine Der Stürmer) because he was blond and blue-eyed.
“I found it uncomfortable that Russell was able to make Goering anything other than a monster. The scenes with his family are touching; he can even be charming. But the gut punch is where James [Vanderbilt, Nuremberg’s director] cuts to original footage from the liberation of the death camps. That day on set was so intense; it felt like the first time you ever saw it.”
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With Rami Malek in his latest release, Nuremberg
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Woodall and I are in the Corinthia hotel just off Whitehall in London. During the Second World War, the building was requisitioned by the government and the D-Day landings were partly planned here in room 424.
“What? I did not know that,” he says. “But I think that says something: there aren’t many survivors from the Holocaust left. Not many who lived through the Second World War either. But this important history can still be right there, under your feet.”
Nuremberg was filmed in Budapest last year. What was it like on set? There couldn’t have been many laughs off-camera, I suggest.
“Oh no, we were all in the same hotel so we let off steam. Except for Russell; he rented a house just outside the town by himself. But he threw a couple of dinner parties.”
At Nuremberg, Goering appeared haughtily indifferent to facing charges of crimes against humanity, as if they were just so many accumulated parking tickets. He almost managed to brush off the case made by US Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson too. It was only the forensic cross-examination by the British lawyer Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (played by Richard E Grant) that saved the day. In the film, Crowe is all charming guile until caught out. Once he’s unable to publicly betray Adolf Hitler, he exudes pure menace.
“With Russell Crowe, there’s a lot of alpha energy, but he’s a good bloke”
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“And being around that energy was incredible,” Woodall says. “I mean, Russell Crowe is totally alpha. He’s a proper film star. I was intimidated by him when we first met, but he took me under his wing a bit. There’s a lot of alpha energy, but he’s a good bloke underneath.”
Ten Nazis were executed following the Nuremberg trial, with Goering managing to take his own life the day before he was due to be hanged. But Kelley himself later committed suicide, believing America was complacent about the possibility that Nazism could flourish anywhere. The film ends with a warning: authoritarianism doesn’t always mean men marching around in “scary uniforms”.
“Yeah, what’s happening in the world is, you know, sickening and terrifying,” Woodall says, taking up the theme. “The film aims to honour the Jews that died in the Holocaust and remind people that these men who committed monstrous crimes were still ordinary people. They could be your friends, your neighbours. It’s sobering, but ultimately this film makes you look at yourself.”
Woodall is enjoying some time off. He’s living with his older brother, Gabriel, watching his beloved Chelsea FC and cooking his girlfriend his signature steak or seafood linguine whenever he gets the chance. But he’s also contemplating his next roles.
The next White Lotus goes into production next year, this time set on the French Riviera and in Paris. Mike White usually opts for an entirely new cast for each series, but he did bring back Jennifer Coolidge after her barnstorming performance in series one. Woodall says he is still in contact with White. Will he be returning?
“No, I’m not,” he says. “And guess what: I’m not going to be James Bond or disappear into any bedrooms with Tom Hollander again either.”
Nuremberg is in cinemas now. Tuner is due for release in early 2026