Ambika Mod is done dying on screen and wants to kill instead

Ambika Mod is running on fumes and doesn’t care who knows it.

The 31-year-old actor, who became an overnight breakout star following her leading role as Emma in Netflix’s One Day, is in the middle of a unique week that her 15-year-old self would be totally flummoxed by. After a weekend celebrating Halloween, where she dressed up with her best friend as Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) from 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, Mod is in the middle of an intense press run leading up to the release of the second season of Netflix’s Black Doves (ironically also starring Knightley in the lead). And all of this must happen before Mod immerses herself in Diwali celebrations over the weekend.

The night before we speak, the Netflix show’s second season premiered over the Thames with a most iconic drone show that the cast caught from a boat. “Yesterday was mad. We had the premiere last night,” Mod says, sitting opposite me dressed in a sharp pinstripe Paul Smith blazer with a neat maroon tie. Sleep, she quickly admits, naturally took a hit: “I went a bit hard.”

You’d never guess. She looks incredible, her hair falling to her shoulders in the most enviable and perfect of waves, her demeanour alert and sharp, and she’s funnier than she’s ever been before. That helps, given that in the second season of showrunner Joe Barton’s universe of scheming spy wives and yearning gay assassins, Mod essays the role of Laila Joshi, an “anarchic and acerbic” contract killer hired by the Black Doves organisation.

When we first meet Laila in the show, she is about to go on a killing spree with Helen (played by Knightley), before which she casually chats about masturbation. Elsewhere, the character walks in on a shootout and shouts “hello, you c*nts” to her colleagues, in French no less. And she does all this while killing at least a dozen men by the minute, in the sexiest of sheer blouses and the sleekest of pulled-back buns.

When the script landed on her desk, Mod barely needed any convincing. “I remember reading Laila’s character and being like, yeah, that’s a bit of me,” she says. She’s careful not to overstate the overlap, but the common ground is clear. “She’s very brash and honest. But if I had three words, I would say unserious (even though she has a very serious job), unbothered, and moisturised, but never in her lane.”

Part of the draw was also Barton himself, best known for crime and sci-fi thrillers like Girl/Haji (2018) and The Lazarus Project (2022-2023). “I’m such a massive fan of Joe and how he writes,” she says. His writing also made her job easier. Mod came to the show straight off two theatre projects, the Royal Court Theatre’s Porn Play and Soho Place’s Every Brilliant Thing, so prep time was thin, and she’s cheerfully frank about her state at the time: “I was also like fucking knackered. But the best thing you can do is just trust the writing, not overthink it, and just say the words. It’s a lesson I have recently picked up, and that’s what I did for the majority of this job.”

For anyone who knows Mod mainly through noble, tragically doomed-to-die characters, Laila (who refreshingly kills instead) is a bit of a jailbreak. Mod spent years working in sketch comedy as a student, even performing at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Despite the attraction of complex, emotionally resonant leads, Mod often finds herself wanting to go back to her comic roots, and playing Laila was the perfect chance to do it. “It felt really freeing to just take the words and run with it. I really just want to do more fun stuff like that.”

Mod did the full rehearsal-and-choreography routine for the gun sequences, even going to the length of extensively training in gun etiquette with the stunt team beforehand. “I’ve never done stunts like that before,” she says. “I just wanted that new exciting challenge and it really didn’t disappoint.” Her favourite sequence is a long one-take scene inside Somerset House, following a covert meet-up between her and Knightley that goes wrong. Staged as a chase through the many interconnected, serpentine rooms of the gargantuan gallery, the sequence sees Mod and Knightley casually walk and chat their way past a series of art installations and grazing tables, all the while knocking out assailants in broad daylight before the shocked eyes of multiple gallery visitors.

It is a laugh-out-loud hilarious sequence that also strikes at the show’s core appeal: the unconventional spy. Mod elaborates: “I think one of the best things about the characters is that no one fits the mould. They feel like characters you would walk past on the street until they start kicking arse. What particularly struck me about my character was, having never seen a brown person be such a badass on screen, the sheer fun I had doing just that.”

Mod makes no presumptions about what the show will do for south Asian representation. Her focus is simpler but, frankly, more practical: to ensure that this opens the door for more people like her to play roles they rarely get offered and parts that truly stretch their creative potential. In 2026, the Hattori Hanzo katana-wielding Bride from Kill Bill and at least one of Charlie’s special equipment-wielding Angels deserve to be brown (cue ‘Bang Bang’ by Nancy Sinatra).

When asked how the girl from Hertfordshire who became famous overnight two years ago, with everyone, including Kim Kardashian, posting about her show online, is doing now, Mod takes a moment. “Oh, God, big question,” she says, taking a deep breath and looking away at the floor. The gap between how people imagine her life looks and what it’s actually like is wide, she admits slowly. Stepping out of the house comes with a recognition today that she wasn’t prepared for growing up. But while she works out what lights her up, she’s trying to get better at stopping to notice how far she’s come. “I think I need to slow down and take a moment. Because frankly, my 15-year-old self, or my 20-year-old self, and to be honest even my 25-year-old self, will look at me now and be like, What the fuck?”

But that said, Mod is already gunning for the next big thing. She bursts out laughing, with a mix of surprise and panic, at the news that her recent comment about wanting to play the next Bond woman has gone viral. Is Black Doves then the best audition tape imaginable? “I mean, I don’t know what else I could do to get in the room,” she says with a nervous chuckle before looking at me with her deadpan stare. “But yeah, I’d be down to play a Bond woman, for sure.”

Consider this your formal notice, Barbara Broccoli.