“It’s one of the great cosmic mysteries. How someone can go from being a total stranger to the most important person in your life.”

This line is one of the most memorable from the limited series One Day, and now it’s inscribed permanently on a plaque at the entrance to the Vennel Steps in Edinburgh, Scotland.

To celebrate One Day, Netflix unveiled the special sign on July 15 to honor the first step(s) in Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) and Dexter Mayhew’s (Leo Woodall) journey in the series, based on David Nicholls’ beloved novel. As of St. Swithin’s Day — aka One Day Day, the moment each year when we catch up with Em and Dex — you, too, can be part of the story by visiting the steps and the sign. 

Of course, Dex and Em became important people to millions of fans, and their alter egos, Woodall and Mod, celebrated St. Swithin’s Day by sharing their thanks via Tudum. “What David Nicholls did with his book deserves to be seen by lots of people, and the reaction has just been amazing,” says Woodall. “The story means a lot to me, and Dexter means a lot to me."

Mod is thankful from the bottom of her heart “and every other vital organ in her body” to all the fans who are taking in the story for the first, second, or third time. “Making this show was one of the greatest joys of my life — as well as being one of the hardest experiences of my life,” says Mod. “It is honestly so confounding to me, the cultural moment and the impact that the show had and is having. It’s not lost on me at all.”

Released on Feb. 8, the series spent seven weeks in Netflix’s Global TV Top 10 (English). While fans took to TikTok to swoon over the tender highs and bemoan the harrowing lows of the love story, they also couldn’t stop revisiting the final scene in which the couple shares a sweet kiss in a flashback on the Vennel Steps. In fact, many even began visiting the real-life location, where they would have seen a pink graffiti heart — which happens to have been painted right on the spot where One Day’s leads filmed their most dry eye–defying scene. Just one of the great cosmic mysteries.

As significant as the moment is to the story, it came about somewhat by chance. “I mean, you sit by yourself in a room and you tap away and decide that they’re going to meet on this corner rather than that corner, and this is where she lives rather than there,” author Nicholls tells Tudum. “These are just tiny choices as part of the working day, and then 13, 14, 15 years later, it becomes a tourist attraction.” 

Leo Woodall (Dexter) and Ambika Mod (Emma) filming at the Vennel Steps on July 14, 2022.

Ambika Mod

Series creator and lead writer Nicole Taylor echoes that sentiment, saying she can’t believe a line she wrote years ago in her pajamas is now set in stone — literally. “Honestly, I thought it was a joke at first,” says Taylor, whose stage adaptation of her film Wild Rose opens in Edinburgh in 2025. “I feel a bit like Emma with her book, [how] she can’t believe she’s written a book. I’ve written other shows, but this has had such a reach, and so that will never not be a thrill. I’m not cool about it. I’m not over it.”

To celebrate One Day Day, Nicholls, Taylor, and lead director and associate producer Molly Manners tell Tudum what led Em and Dex up the iconic steps all those years ago.

The book

“The castle was just coming into view when she heard the footsteps …”

The 2009 bestseller One Day isn’t autobiographical, per se, but it is rooted in author Nicholls’ experiences. An executive producer on the series and scribe of Episode 13, Nicholls wrote the novel as a love letter to Edinburgh. “I try and write about places where I physically stood,” he says. “I want to write what I know. I want to be able to sense it and remember it.”

Like Em and Dex, Nicholls’ story in Edinburgh began in the summer of 1988, when he staged a play as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He and 20 of his mates stayed in a two-bedroom flat on Rankeillor Street, the street where Emma lives. So many of Emma’s experiences — her summer in Paris, her European holiday — echo Nicholls’ own. 

When he returned to Edinburgh in 2007 to plot the novel, he visited the posh part of town near Dundas Street and thought, “This is the right place for Dexter to come from.” Nicholls sketched his route on a map and walked it multiple times to make sure it made sense. He also threw in an overdue hike to the top of Arthur’s Seat. Back when he lived there in ’88, “everyone was climbing it at four in the morning and seeing the sun come up, and I didn’t do that,” he says, aligning himself with Dex who, in the story, also hasn’t done a sunrise hike to the peak. “Isn’t that awful?”

Maybe, but when it came to sculpting a pivotal romantic moment, Nicholls didn’t skip any landmarks. He meticulously researched the location for Em and Dex’s grand kiss, which takes place in a different venue than the series: on the corner of George Street, just above the Mound, with the National Gallery of Art and Edinburgh Castle in the background. It’s a very particular spot, but also a busy junction which didn’t make it ideal for a production crew. “The location scouts and Molly did a fantastic job of finding spots that aren’t quite what are specified in the novel, but suit the mood,” he says. 

The script

EXT. EDINBURGH STREET. FLASHBACK. 1988.

When Glaswegian Taylor read One Day in her 20s, she immediately identified with Emma as “a Northerner coming down, trying to make it, and doing shitty jobs,” she tells Tudum. “I’d never seen me in a book before, and every British woman felt that that was them.” 

In writing Em and Dex’s final moments on the steps together in Episode 14, Taylor was hoping to conjure a sense of the ineffable. “Even if you’re not religious, you get the sense that time isn’t real,” she explains. “The past, the present, the future —everything’s united. Everyone you’ve ever been, everyone you’ve ever met, everything collapses into this fine point of light.” 

Nicholls’ novel and the series finish in the same way — with Em and Dex’s “everything kiss,” as the script reads — but unlike in the show, readers experience the Arthur’s Seat hike and kiss scene for the first time at the end of the book. In Taylor’s adaptation, she portrayed most of those scenes in Episode 1, deciding she could hold back extra bits of conversation from that one memorable day so viewers could have as much Emma as possible in the finale. “It was so joyful to get one more taste of just the sweetness,” she says. “I’m crying!”

Manners agrees that getting extra insight into Em and Dex’s Edinburgh day made the final scenes even more special. “There’s such a sense of closure,” she says. “You feel like he’s saying goodbye to her, but you also see the kiss you never saw, and it informs and gives a new lens to everything you’ve just seen.” 

By the time Episode 14 rolled around, Taylor was already writing specifically for Woodall and Mod, who were cast early in the pre-production process. “The writer’s dream is to have actors [who are] able to express things without any words,” says Taylor. This gave her the “chutzpah” to write stage directions like “Chemistry. More than chemistry” for that finale scene and know they would deliver. “The thing is, if you write a stage direction like that, you’ve just got to be so bloody lucky with the actors,” she says. 

She adds that Mod and Woodall’s approach to these scenes was as distinct as Dex and Em’s outlooks on life. “Leo is just pure instinct, and Ambika has got such incredible intellect and she’s so analytical. But whatever place they were coming from, they both get to the same destination.” 

The steps

“See you around.” 

“I hope so.”

Manners purposefully selected the Vennel Steps because it’s “classic Edinburgh.,” but she also wanted a location that has the hustle and bustle of people and years passing, but also allows Em and Dex to appear static in the midst of it all. “The series is so much about time, isn’t it?” she says. “The passing of time. It felt nice to really feel like you’ve come back to where you started.” 

As the series culminates in Em and Dex’s “everything kiss,” Woodall and Mod had to kiss many, many times to get it right. The entire scene was choreographed — with an intimacy coordinator on hand — so a stabilizer camera could capture their “natural chemistry,” the director explains. 

After Nicholls watched the rushes of the kiss, he emailed Manners to say he shed a tear too. When they got together to screen Episode 14 in the edit suite, and Nicholls and Taylor watched the montage before the kiss for the first time, Nicholls was crying so much that Manners initially thought he was laughing. “[The montage] wasn’t in the script and I didn’t know it was coming,” says Nicholls. “I absolutely freaked out. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much at anything in my life as that first cut I saw of that final episode. I was a mess.” 

Celebrating One Day Day

“St. Swithin’s Day ties into the themes of fate, predestination, and the unpredictability of the future.”

This might surprise you, but Nicholls gets nervous when St. Swithin’s Day rolls around each year. “I’m very proud of the book, but I never know if I should post on social media or just let it slide past,” he says. When the novel was first published, fans sent Nicholls letters and cards through his publisher, but, he acknowledges, it’s not quite the same as the “instant emotional response” the internet can thrust upon you. 

However, he feels like a cool dad now that his daughter finally understands what he does all day, and that young people, especially, have become obsessed with the series and made countless TikToks about it. “I like the idea that they can look at their parents and realize that their mom and dad went through similar dilemmas, had the same kind of fears and anxieties about entering adult life,” he says. “All those vulnerabilities, and disappointments, and moments of intense sadness and friendship.”

The author credits that public outpouring to the performances of his two leads. “Ambika just struck such a powerful chord with so many viewers, and her performance is so beautiful,” says Nicholls. “Leo gave the character a kind of depth that isn’t always on the page.”

He ultimately chose St. Swithin’s Day as the “one day” because St. Swithin is buried in Winchester Cathedral, near where Nicholls grew up. It needed to be a day in summer because Em and Dex meet at graduation, and it needed to be a day that they could notice sometimes, but not always. “The myth of St. Swithin is that if it rains on St. Swithin's Day, it’s going to be a wet summer,” says Nicholls. “It’s an attempt to predict the future, which is, of course, impossible. So it ties into the themes of fate, predestination, and the unpredictability of the future.”

Em and Dex may not be consciously aware of the significance of July 15th every single year, but it’s not a day that sneaks past unnoticed for One Day diehards. And Nicholls can’t quite believe it: “I love the idea of people making pilgrimages and remembering the book on that day, and now the show,” he says.

Re-live One Day not just on that one memorable day, but every day. Only on Netflix.