Leo Woodall’s hilarious anecdote about Jennifer Coolidge is going viral
Leo Woodall is undoubtedly one of the most talked-about men in the world, and with two major (and critically acclaimed) projects dropping this past year, his star is only rising.
The 27-year-old actor made waves this month as Dexter Mayhew in One Day, with the Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls' bestselling book already a cult-classic and tipped for major awards.
It was in HBO's The White Lotus however that Woodall made a name for himself, starring in the second season as Jack, a sinister Essex-born character posing as the nephew of Quentin (Tom Hollander).
And while promoting One Day with his co-star Ambika Mod (Emma Morley), Woodall inevitably shared a few anecdotes about his big break in The white Lotus, with one in particular going viral.
The anecdote in question involved the HBO show's star Jennifer Coolidge (Tanya McQuoid), with Woodall recalling in an interview with The One Show that he thought she hated him in the early days of filming.
It turns out however that Coolidge was just a "masterful improviser" and there was no bad blood in the slightest.
“[Jennifer Coolidge is] a masterful improviser and it scared the life out of me," Woodall explained The One Show this week. “My first day on set, speaking, was this dinner scene and I think at the top of the scene, someone’s collapsed in the background and we were told to improvise, so I made up a joke at this guy’s expense. And she kind of went, in character, ‘No, you can’t say that. No’."
Woodall continued: “I was like a deer in the headlights. And afterwards I thought, ‘Oh God. Jennifer hates me.’ She’s just so great. A great actor.”
"During Lotus, I knew that whatever I did, it didn’t really matter. The show was going to be amazing and it was going to be a hit," Woodall explained recently in a conversation with Tom Hollander for Interview Magazine. "But with One Day, it was not a new piece of writing, but a new show, and it’s hard to picture what it’s going to look like in the edit. My expectations were high, but it exceeded all of them."
We will continue to update this story.
