Leo Woodall Is Entering His Movie Star Era

As I waited to interview Leo Woodall for his new film “Tuner” earlier this week, I took a moment to zone out in the living room of a very luxe Manhattan hotel suite on a very hot day. As I waited, an older gentleman ambled in the room, looking for snacks. It was Dustin Hoffman.

Now, it’s not particularly notable that Hoffman would be there — he does, after all, co-star in the Daniel Roher film about a piano tuner with an auditory medical condition and a serious knack for plucking keys and cracking safes — but that he was mostly free-range and (relatably!) looking for snacks struck me. It also offered a great icebreaker to open my chat with Woodall, a little shared experience: what’s it like when Dustin Hoffman just walks into a room? (Personally, I panicked and pointed to the next room and said, “There are mini muffins in there!”)

I mentioned this a few minutes later to Woodall. He laughed. “Honestly, I think we probably had a similar experience,” the actor said. “He walks into a room and the energy shifts. He’s remarkable. He’s one of my heroes of acting and he made the experience very singular.”

In short, he’s a movie star, which is what “Tuner” is poised to turn Woodall into. Not that the British actor, who previously broke out with turns in the second season of “The White Lotus” (as a conflicted rent boy!), the limited series “One Day” (a heartbreaker made all the more shattering by his soulful turn), and “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” (as the rare on-screen younger love interest who might actually have a shred of emotional intelligence, even if his name is “Roxster”) is eager to embrace that.

Instead, the actor is far more interested in talking about the way his process is still growing and morphing and changing, and the kind of career he wants to build for himself. Making any kind of grand proclamation about lofty goals doesn’t seem to be his style. Rather, Woodall is more easy chatting about his co-stars and the kind of nifty, practical prep work that went into “Tuner.” That’s a star turn we can get behind.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

IndieWire: What sort of role or project were you looking for when this one came along?

The way I kind of approached it, which sometimes isn’t the most front-footed, is [that] I just really want to do movies that I want to see and that I grew up loving. I think Daniel and I shared that about this movie, he wanted to make a movie that references and is kind of inspired by movies that he loves. When I’m Dustin’s age, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be anywhere close to his legacy, but I still want to have left behind a bunch of movies that I would want to see.

The film has a pretty distinct logline and synopsis, “Oh, it’s a heist film and also a romance and also he has this unique condition,” and on and on. What was the first thing that you knew about the film?

I knew that it was about a piano tuner who has hyperacusis and couldn’t play piano anymore, and works with his sort of uncle who is going to be played by Dustin Hoffman. [And when Daniel and I met on Zoom], we had an alignment on what we saw the movie as and what we kind of envisioned the movie to be like. It was the same with character.

Of course, everything kind of changed in the months after that, but at the time I remember “Drive” was referenced and we both kind of went, “Oh, yeah,” and he said, “Did someone tell you that I’d been thinking of that? Because that’s one of my references for it.” I said no, and it’s true, I think we both just had a similar vision for Niki and for the movie.

‘Tuner’Black Bear

What was it about Niki that you liked?

So much. His pain, and his suffering, and his loneliness was something that I immediately drew me towards him. I don’t know, maybe part of me felt like we were the same at our worst or something. I just felt connected to him. Daniel had wanted to sort of beg the question of, if your passion and your purpose is taken away from you, then who are you? I was impressed and in awe of him, I’m in awe of anyone that has a very unique talent, a very special talent. And I loved, [laughs] I mean, I hated it for him, but for story purposes, I loved that he had this talent that he had to bury deep inside for whatever reason.

How important is it for you to see yourself in a character?

For me, it’s always vital to find the differences between the two of you and the similarities. The differences are important to recognize, because you don’t want too much of you and your decision-making to come through in the character because then you’re not really serving the character. You’re kind of just living as you, but on the other side of that coin, there is no other version of you. Everybody has their own uniqueness, and I think when you can bring that to a character as opposed to just complete separation, then it adds a spark that makes a person feel alive that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Are you someone who, when you’re done shooting something, you are able to shake off the character?

I don’t know yet. I think it might take a bit more time to really recognize that about myself. There’s always a kind of flatness when you finish a job and you say goodbye to a character and you say goodbye to the people that you’ve been working with for however much time. That period is always quite difficult. I always kind of forget that it’s coming and then it comes and I’m like, “Oh, crap, why do I feel so flat?” I guess there’s a kind of pattern there.

‘Tuner’

You learned to play the piano for this role, what was that process like?

Both Havana and I had months of training hours every day. Niki is a once-in-a-generation talent and, at the very beginning, I sort of naively got excited that I would learn this talent and I would become this virtuoso and they said, “It’s going to take a little bit more than a few months of piano training.” Especially because I didn’t play piano beforehand, but I’ve always been drawn toward that instrument in particular. I’m not massively musical. I love music and I can’t imagine my life without it, but creating music and playing music has never been something I’ve done, but piano always had a kind of, I don’t know, always tweaked my interest more than other instruments.

What was surprising about that process?

It’s so much more complicated than I thought, because I was also learning how to tune pianos, so you’d lift up the top and it’s sight that you don’t expect. There’s three strings to every key and if one string is in any way out of place, you have to tune all three perfectly, and each one is going to be completely different. Dustin was having a conversation with one of our piano tuners, Dwayne Wright, and he said every piano has a soul, which is such a sort of beautiful thing, and it honestly is kind of true. Every single piano is going to be different in the way you tap the key is going to affect every single string in that instrument. There’s so much more to it than I had originally thought.

Can you still play?

I definitely made a conscious choice to take a mini break from piano, and the mini break has lasted longer than I had anticipated. At the beginning of the process, I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be great and I’m going to wrap this movie and I’m going to just stay in lessons and I’m going to learn to read music, etc.” Alas, that has not happened, but I do want it to. I do want it to!

Speaking of prep work, do you watch other films to get in a certain mindset before you begin a project? Were you watching heist films for this?

I didn’t watch any specifically to get ready for it, Daniel had given me a couple of movies to watch and I hadn’t done it, but then I also hadn’t seen his movie “Navalny,” which I deliberately kept off for a while because we became friends very quickly and it was almost funny that I just had never seen his Oscar-winning movie. [Laughs]

It’s not a huge part of my process. I think it used to be. I remember very early, on before I’d even started working professionally and when I was just at school, if we were doing the American classics, then I would watch the movies about these American classics. Maybe that was the reason why I kind of stopped doing that, because it is different comparing a film version of a play to an actual play version of a play.

It does seem like your process is evolving.

I mean, it has to be. I want to get better and better. There are so many things that I want to improve on and hope that will continue until I’m Dustin’s age, if I get that far. It will probably be a never-ending process, and I’ve made peace with that. I don’t want to feel like I’ve not learned anything, be in my eighties and not learned anything. I think having some patience is also important.

‘Tuner’Alan Markfield

You and Havana have lovely chemistry, and there’s a very sweet romance tucked into this film. How did you two bond off-screen to make that shine on-screen?

It was so easy working with Havana, and I hope that she would say the same about me. We bonded pretty quickly, and I think having the piano training, sharing that, we kind of felt like we became comrades in trying to beat this instrument. I could tell very quickly how much she loved Ruthie and that passion for telling her story was only going to be something really great to work off when we came to do our scenes.

And you and Dustin have to feel believable as people who have been close for years, how did you build that chemistry?

He makes acting a lot easier, just his presence in the moment and in a scene and with you is so second to none in my experience. I already kind of loved him, so it was harder for me to play all the moments of being fed up with him, when Niki has those eye roll moments. [Laughs]

His body of work has just affected me at so many different points in my life, as a kid with “Hook” and then as a young actor hoping to do something and learn something with “All the President’s Men,” his body of work is so varied and so extraordinary. Even without meeting him, he’s touched you and he’s affected you. It was easy to feel that kind of level of love and that gratitude and that closeness with him before we’d even met. It makes me sound like a freaking psycho.

You’re still pretty early in your career, but you’ve also had a pretty good variety in terms of genres, doing both film and TV, mixing it up. What’s something you’d love to do you have not done yet?

There’s quite a few, honestly. I’ve always wanted to do a really good, as authentic as possible, sports film. I feel like European football hasn’t been nailed on screen. There are some good ones, but not nailed. There’s a lot of really great baseball movies and American football movies and basketball movies, but it’d be great to do a European football. Or boxing! I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter to me, I just love sports.

Black Bear will release “Tuner” in limited theaters beginning Friday, May 22, with expansion to follow on Friday, May 29.