Interview: Leo Woodall on ‘Tuner’
It’s been a meteoric few years for Leo Woodall. After breaking out as the smolderingly enigmatic Jack in the second season of HBO’s The White Lotus, the British actor has since gone from strength to strength, headlining Netflix’s universally adored One Day opposite the incredible Ambika Mod, stealing scenes in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and quickly cementing himself as one of the most exciting and in-demand young actors of his generation. His latest project, the offbeat indie crime drama Tuner, may just be his best showcase yet, a wholly captivating star vehicle that announces him as a leading man of sensitivity and range.
The narrative feature debut from Academy Award-winning documentarian Daniel Roher (Navalny), Tuner world-premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival to widespread acclaim before going on to play at the Toronto International Film Festival and earning a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of its theatrical release through Black Bear Pictures. The film centers on Niki White (Woodall), a gifted young piano tuner who suffers from hyperacusis, a rare and debilitating auditory condition that makes him hypersensitive to sound and which has long since put an end to his own promising career as a concert pianist. Working alongside his late father’s blunt, charismatic best friend and mentor Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), Niki crisscrosses New York City tuning Steinways for the city’s wealthy elite, until a chance encounter with shady security contractor Uri (Lior Raz) reveals that his hypersensitive hearing might be even more valuable for cracking safes. As Niki sinks deeper into the city’s criminal underbelly, his budding relationship with driven composition student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) threatens to come undone, pulling him into a moral and emotional reckoning he never saw coming.
At the heart of Tuner is Woodall’s deeply felt, incredibly nuanced performance as Niki, a man so finely attuned to the world around him that he can barely move through it without protection. To capture the specificity of hyperacusis, an under-discussed condition that even the actor himself was unfamiliar with before signing on, Woodall did extensive research, including speaking with people who live with it daily. “I wasn’t aware of it. It’s a very rare condition, and one of the first things I did was speak to a man called Alex Ruger, who has the condition and has lived with the condition for, I think, around a decade,” explains Woodall. “And he spoke to me at length about his experience with it and navigating it, which was invaluable to me.”
The actor also undertook months of intensive piano training in order to convincingly bring Niki’s musicianship to life onscreen, working alongside Liu, who plays his classical conservatory-trained love interest Ruthie. “I wasn’t experienced at all with piano before the movie,” he admits. “We had months of training, both Havana and myself, hours a day, every day. It was wonderful. It was challenging, and I think we were both quite stressed that we didn’t have enough time, but we just worked really hard at it to be able to do a convincing job.”
If Niki’s musicianship is the soul of the film, then his dynamic with Harry, played by two-time Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman in one of his richest, warmest performances in years, is undoubtedly its beating heart. Their odd-couple chemistry crackles with the easy, well-worn affection of a surrogate father and son, lending the film some of its most charming and unexpectedly funny moments, including a now-instantly memorable scene in which Hoffman regales Woodall with a wildly improvised story about a tuna fish. “That was all improv,” reveals Woodall. “There’s probably a five-and-a-half-hour cut of this movie involving all of Dustin’s stories, and that tuna fish one specifically was probably like a ten-minute piece that he just kind of plucked out of thin air, and I just tried to keep up with it. And that’s the magic of Dustin.”
Beyond its propulsive heist mechanics and disarming musical charm, Tuner is also a remarkably tender character study, one acutely interested in the inner life of a man whose own life never quite went the way he expected. There’s a real, palpable ache to Niki, who carries his lost musical career and the daily limits of his condition with a quiet, simmering resentment. And so when the opportunity to crack his first safe presents itself, Woodall makes a meal of one of the film’s most quietly transcendent moments, capturing the heady relief of a man briefly liberated from a life that feels too small for him. “That’s it in a nutshell,” he says when asked about the moment. “It’s the life or a part of his life that doesn’t exist, and it’s the opposite of what he currently lives. I think he’s resentful and deeply frustrated with how he’s sort of forced to live his life. And ultimately he knows what ensues is wrong. But what draws him to is just this feeling of something exciting, something new, something thrilling that he lacks in his life.”
Led by a soulful Woodall, a scene-stealing Hoffman, and a warm, quietly affecting Rose Liu, Tuner marks Roher as a filmmaker with a sharp instinct for character and tone. For Woodall, it’s another reminder of why he’s one of the most exciting actors of his generation, and why whatever he does next will undoubtedly be worth watching.
Tuner is now playing in theaters.