Lone Scherfig’s adaptation of David Nicholls’s bestseller compresses twenty years of a friendship into 108 minutes, one summer date at a time, and fifteen years on it shares the story with a Netflix series and a stage musical heading for the West End.

One Day is the 2011 film version of David Nicholls’s 2009 novel, directed by the Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig from a screenplay Nicholls wrote himself. Anne Hathaway plays Emma Morley and Jim Sturgess plays Dexter Mayhew, two graduates who spend one night together in Edinburgh and then drift in and out of each other’s lives. The device that made the book a phenomenon survives intact: the story only ever shows them on 15 July, St Swithin’s Day, year after year, for two decades.

The premise: one date, twenty years

The story opens on 15 July 1988, the night of their graduation from the University of Edinburgh. Dexter comes from a wealthy southern family and was privately educated at Winchester College; Emma is from a working-class family in the north of England. They spend the night together without sleeping together and agree, in the time-honoured way, to just be friends.

From there the film jumps a year at a time. Emma moves to London to become a writer and ends up working in a Mexican restaurant, where she meets Ian, an aspiring stand-up comedian and devoted science-fiction fan. Dexter travels, teaches English in Paris and, by 1993, has become the presenter of a rowdy late-night television show. A holiday together in Dinard in 1992 tests the attraction between them, and in 1994 Dexter visits his parents after his mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The middle years pull them apart. A dinner in 1996 ends in a falling-out, Dexter’s television career fades as he fails to win over younger audiences, and he settles down with Sylvie. Emma, meanwhile, leaves Ian, starts teaching and, by the wedding of two old friends in 2000, has landed a book deal. The final stretch moves between London and Paris and takes a turn we will not spoil here, before the film closes on Arthur’s Seat, the hill above Edinburgh where the whole story began.

From bestseller to screenplay

The novel was published by Hodder & Stoughton in June 2009 and became one of the biggest British fiction successes of its decade. It was named Galaxy Book of the Year in 2010, went on to sell more than six million copies worldwide and has been translated into some forty languages. Nicholls, who had worked as a screenwriter before turning to fiction, announced at the time of publication that he was adapting it for the screen himself, and acknowledged that the hardest part would be casting actors who could play both students and people approaching middle age.

The idea itself came from Thomas Hardy. Nicholls has recalled reading a passage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a student, in which Tess reflects that among all the days of the year there is one that matters more than birthdays or anniversaries, though she cannot know which. Two decades later he was adapting Hardy’s novel for the BBC, met the passage again and built a book on the notion of an ordinary day that turns out not to be ordinary at all. He chose St Swithin’s Day because it fitted a graduation and because the old proverb attached to it is about unpredictability.

Lone Scherfig after An Education

Lone Scherfig, born in 1959, graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1984. Her international breakthrough was Italian for Beginners (2000), a Dogme 95 comedy that won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. She followed it with Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002) and then made her English-language name with An Education (2009), written by Nick Hornby and starring Carey Mulligan, which earned nominations at both the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards.

One Day was her next film and, unusually for her, a script she had not co-written. Scherfig has said that she prefers working from her own pages because she can cut or add on the spot, but that someone else’s characters bring a whole world she could not have invented. After One Day she went on to direct The Riot Club (2014), Their Finest (2016), The Kindness of Strangers (2019) and The Movie Teller (2023), keeping a foot in both British and international productions.

Casting Anne Hathaway as Emma

The casting of the lead was not straightforward. Because the story is so rooted in Britain, Scherfig was not looking for an American actress for Emma. Anne Hathaway has said that she got hold of the script quietly, flew to London to meet the director and came out of what she described as the worst meeting of her life. Before leaving she wrote down a list of songs for Scherfig to listen to, explaining that the music could say what she had failed to say in the room. Scherfig listened, and Hathaway got the part.

She arrived on the project between two career landmarks: an Academy Award nomination for Rachel Getting Married (2008) behind her and, a year after One Day, The Dark Knight Rises and Les Misérables (both 2012) ahead. Emma is written as a Yorkshirewoman, and the BBC reported that Hathaway watched the soap opera Emmerdale to work on the accent, which became one of the most discussed points of the film’s British release. Jim Sturgess, the English actor known for Across the Universe (2007), 21 (2008) and The Way Back (2010), took the role of Dexter, the privileged southerner whose charm is both his calling card and his problem.

The supporting cast is a roll call of British and American character actors. Patricia Clarkson and Ken Stott play Dexter’s parents, Romola Garai plays Sylvie and Rafe Spall plays Ian. Jodie Whittaker, years before she became the first woman to play the lead in Doctor Who, is Emma’s university friend Tilly; Tom Mison is Dexter’s friend Callum; Matt Berry appears as Aaron; and Toby Regbo plays Sylvie’s brother Samuel.

Locations, crew and soundtrack

Principal photography began in July 2010 and moved between Scotland, England and France. The production shot in Edinburgh in August 2010, using landmarks such as Arthur’s Seat, before moving to London, where Parliament Hill Lido stood in for the swimming scenes, a house in Granville Road in Stroud Green hosted scenes with Jim Sturgess and Romola Garai, and Leila’s shop and café on Arnold Circus, near Brick Lane, served as a location. Ridgmont Station on the Marston Vale line was used for the railway scenes, and in Brittany the crew filmed in Dinan and Dinard, near Saint-Malo, turning a seaside club into the Café Paradis.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer was Benoît Delhomme, the editor Barney Pilling and the composer Rachel Portman, the first woman composer to win an Academy Award. The film was produced by Nina Jacobson through Color Force, the company behind The Hunger Games films, the first of which arrived the following year, with Random House Films and Focus Features, and co-financed by Film4. Focus Features released it in the United States and Universal Pictures in the United Kingdom. Island Records issued the soundtrack album, which uses songs by Elvis Costello, Del Amitri, Tricky, Primal Scream, Fatboy Slim, Corona, Robbie Williams and Tears for Fears to anchor each year of the story in its own pop moment, alongside Portman’s cues.

Release and the long afterlife of One Day

One Day premiered in New York on 8 August 2011 and opened in the United States on 19 August and in the United Kingdom on 24 August. Made on a budget of around $15 million, it grossed about $59.4 million worldwide. Its reception was divided, and most of the debate came back to the same two points: how much of a 448-page novel a 108-minute film can carry, and Hathaway’s accent.

The story did not end there. On 8 February 2024 Netflix released a 14-episode limited series adapted by Nicole Taylor, with Ambika Mod as Emma and Leo Woodall as Dexter, and it became the most-watched series on the platform worldwide in the week of 12 February, with 9.9 million views. The longer format allowed the series to cover more of the novel than the film could.

A third adaptation followed in 2026. One Day, a stage musical with a book by David Greig and songs by Amanda Sudano and Abner Ramirez of the duo Johnnyswim, directed by Max Webster, had its world premiere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh on 11 March 2026, extended its run and became the highest-grossing production in the theatre’s history. It transfers to the Garrick Theatre in London’s West End from 17 November 2026 to 14 March 2027, with Sharon Rose and Jamie Muscato continuing as Emma and Dexter.

Where the film sits now

Fifteen years on, Scherfig’s film has become the compact version of a story that now exists in three forms: a feature that gives each year a few minutes, a series that gives most years an episode, and a musical built for a single evening in a theatre. Each answers the same question about Nicholls’s structure differently, namely how much of a life can be told through one day a year. The 2011 film’s answer is the shortest, and with the musical opening in London in November 2026 it is likely to be the version many newcomers seek out first.