Leo Woodall spent months learning to play the piano for Tuner role

Leo Woodall spent months mastering the piano for his role in Tuner.

The 29-year-old actor stars in Daniel Roher's crime thriller as Niki White, a once-gifted piano player who uses his heightened hearing to become a thief after being left unable to perform due to hearing disorder hyperacusis, and revealed the extensive process that he and co-star Havana Rose Liu went through to learn how to play the instrument.

Leo told IndieWire: "Both Havana and I had months of training hours every day. Niki is a once-in-a-generation talent and, at the very beginning, I sort of naively got excited that I would learn this talent and I would become this virtuoso and they said, 'It’s going to take a little bit more than a few months of piano training.'

"Especially because I didn’t play piano beforehand, but I’ve always been drawn toward that instrument in particular. I’m not massively musical. I love music and I can’t imagine my life without it, but creating music and playing music has never been something I’ve done, but piano always had a kind of, I don’t know, always tweaked my interest more than other instruments."

Woodall - whose alter ego is also a piano tuner - explained that he was surprised at how complex the process was.

The One Day actor said: "It’s so much more complicated than I thought, because I was also learning how to tune pianos, so you’d lift up the top and it’s sight that you don’t expect. There’s three strings to every key and if one string is in any way out of place, you have to tune all three perfectly, and each one is going to be completely different.

"Every single piano is going to be different in the way you tap the key is going to affect every single string in that instrument. There’s so much more to it than I had originally thought."

Leo appears in Tuner alongside Dustin Hoffman - who portrays Niki's mentor Harry Horowitz - and expressed his admiration for the Rain Man actor.

The Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy star said: "He makes acting a lot easier, just his presence in the moment and in a scene and with you is so second to none in my experience. I already kind of loved him, so it was harder for me to play all the moments of being fed up with him, when Niki has those eye roll moments.

"His body of work has just affected me at so many different points in my life, as a kid with Hook and then as a young actor hoping to do something and learn something with All the President’s Men, his body of work is so varied and so extraordinary.

"Even without meeting him, he’s touched you and he’s affected you. It was easy to feel that kind of level of love and that gratitude and that closeness with him before we’d even met. It makes me sound like a freaking psycho."