How Havana Rose Liu and Leo Woodall Transformed Into Musical Virtuosos for Tuner

Minor spoilers below.

Growing up, actor Leo Woodall was always drawn to the pianos at his performing arts school, but he never really learned to play them. He practiced “little tunes” here and there, feeling them out on one hand, but that was it. However, in Tuner, the new indie film from Navalny director Daniel Roher, Woodall is an outright piano prodigy.

“It required a lot of piano training,” Woodall tells ELLE with a laugh.

“Every day, hours a day, I would be sat at a piano learning exactly the correct seating position, body posture, and hand posture, and how your body moves around the instrument, how the music affects your body, and how you can affect the music with your body,” he recalls.

In the film, Woodall—known for roles in The White Lotus and One Day—plays a piano tuner named Niki, who works with his mentor and boss Harry (Dustin Hoffman). Niki was once a virtuoso pianist but stopped playing after being diagnosed with a hearing condition called hyperacusis, which makes him very sensitive to loud noises. Things like fire alarms and car horns can be extremely painful for him, nearly paralyzing. “I instantly felt great empathy for Niki’s suffering and pain and loneliness,” Woodall says.

During one tuning job at a wealthy client’s house, Niki encounters a group of robbers trying to break into the owner’s safe, and they force him to help. As it turns out, he has a knack for safecracking, thanks to his hypersensitive hearing. The discovery of his new talent (and riches) leads him down a thrilling but dangerous criminal path, which threatens not only his life but also his budding romance with Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a composition student he met while tuning her piano.

Liu, of Bottoms and Lurker fame, underwent piano boot camp, too. Although she learned to play when she was young, she stopped around middle school and had to relearn the basics before shooting. However, there wasn’t much time: “I only had two months of prep, and I had five concert piano pieces to learn basically,” she says. Instead of a thorough refresher, she focused more on the pieces she’d play in the film, as well as some scales and warm-ups so her improvisations on-screen would look natural. She ended up learning more pieces than Woodall, because Ruthie is seen playing the instrument more often than Niki.

Marius de Vries, the film’s executive music producer, helped make sure the performances were done right. A Grammy- and BAFTA-winning musician who’s worked on films like La La Land and CODA, he not only helped guide the actors but also composed the performance pieces for the film and met weekly with Roher and co-writer Robert Ramsey. They discussed everything from possible needle drops to depicting “an environment that represents a music conservatory and the life of the young working musician that would be as authentic as possible,” he says. “It was enormously important to us that when the film goes in front of real pianists, real conservatory members, and real musical academics” it would be “recognizably true to their own lives.”

Liu dove into lessons on most of her free days, sometimes three times a week or more, and then practiced “many hours a day” in between so she could get ready for the next lesson. She had a keyboard at home and another at her home in Toronto, where filming took place. (De Vries mentions that she even took classes at The Royal Toronto Conservatory.) As for Woodall, who was starting from a near-beginner level, he began lessons in London, then trained over Zoom, then took more lessons in New York, and eventually in Toronto.

“I felt a lot of pressure and a real anxiety of wanting to make it all so great,” Liu says. But she couldn’t bring that stress into the performance. “You should be in full, relaxed release while playing,” she says, but with little technical skill to start with, she hurt her wrist from playing so much so fast.

That just shows how seriously she took her research; she even interviewed real-life pianists and watched videos to familiarize herself with the performers’ movements and stage presence. “My algorithm got very concert hall,” she jokes. De Vries constantly sent her concert footage, which “felt like I had a daily newsletter of pianists coming into my inbox,” she says.

The work paid off. “One of the things I’m most proud of is how well they equipped themselves because I think they look totally believable, and that’s a testament to the amount of hard work they did,” De Vries says of Woodall and Liu’s performances. “But it’s also a testament to the team that I built around the piano department,” he adds.

That group includes principal piano coach Liz Kinnan, who previously trained Ryan Gosling for La La Land; composer and pianist Eve Egoyan, who supported the actors in Toronto; and pianists Kate Dunton and Serene, who both advised the cast, especially Liu, on what a musician’s life is really like. Most musicians in the film and on the soundtrack were students from The Royal Conservatory in Toronto, De Vries notes. They brought a palpable enthusiasm to the production, especially since it was many of their first times working on a movie.

Musicians were available on set as hand doubles, but the actors mostly preferred to try to perform the pieces themselves. “Both Havana and Leo took pride in doing as much of it as possible as they could,” De Vries explains. “So, at most, a couple of the hand close-ups you see when they’re doing something really tricky might be the hand doubles. But in the end, those wonderful young pianists from the Royal Conservatory who were there as our piano support ended up being there more as encouragement and mental support rather than for physical hand-doubling activities.”

Aside from the technical aspects, Liu also learned how to channel the pieces emotionally with De Vries’s help. While composing Ruthie’s main piece, he “basically came up with a storyline with me about my grandmother and her life in order to embed into the piece of music and to narrativize what all of the different dynamics needed to be,” she says. Like Ruthie, Liu was mourning her grandmother, who had passed before the shoot.

“She was my main relationship to music,” Liu says, “and part of why I wanted to do this movie to begin with was because of trying to figure out how to process a lot of those feelings of grief and a desire to carry a baton of creativity in my female ancestral lineage.”

Woodall also had an emotional performing moment when Niki finally returns to the piano and plays for the first time in years, in a truly stunning, cathartic reveal toward the end of the film. “I was really nervous,” Woodall says, because he wanted to show everyone that he’d been practicing. He also wanted to do the scene justice.

“When I first read [the script], I was just blown away by it,” he says. “It’s so satisfying….Having it placed at the end of the final scene in the movie, you have to have the payoff. It was a lot of pressure, but I was so fired up by it.” After a few takes, he nailed it. “I remember [producer] JoAnne Sellar came in crying and she was like, ‘This is beautiful!’ I was like, ‘Oh God, thank God.’”

Tuner first premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in the fall of 2025 and then headed to the Sundance Film Festival in January 2026, where it continued to earn buzz before landing in theaters last week. An exciting heist-meets-musical drama, it also arrives shortly after Timothée Chalamet’s comments about ballet and opera sparked a discourse about the relevance of more classical performing arts genres. De Vries, for what it’s worth, doesn’t think Chalamet meant what he said—and believes that the controversy got blown out of proportion. “But it’s emblematic of the fact that in certain sections of our cultural community, classical music is becoming marginalized,” he says. “But having said that, to the extent that I follow the contemporary classical scene, which is quite extensively, I think there’s more exciting new music and more receptivity to complex contemporary music now than there has been in any decade I could remember.”

He adds, “I don’t think I’m at all worried about those heritage genres disappearing. They’ve always been evolving, and I would encourage that evolution to continue in all of the interesting ways in which it is already doing.”

Woodall took a break from the piano after filming, but he still plays every once in a while, now that he’s had some training. These days, he’s tackling film scores that he loves. “My favorite is Interstellar,” he says. “Currently, I’m learning Lord of the Rings.”