How has life changed for Aimee Lou Wood since she starred in everyone’s favourite luxe hotel thriller The White Lotus? When we meet in Fitzrovia, London, she is straight off a plane from Los Angeles — a daze-making 24-hour visit to have her photograph taken for The Hollywood Reporter, the kind of unhinged thing you have to do when you become big news. She has barely slept and, crucially, “I haven’t even brushed my gnashers!” she says, eyes wide with apologetic horror.
It would be fair to surmise that while life has changed quite a lot for Wood, a 31-year-old from Stockport, in silver trainers, she hasn’t changed an awful lot with it. She is warm, funny, fragile, incorrigibly chatty and seemingly without filter. “The plane was arctic, ARC-TIC,” she announces to the room. “I had to keep getting up to do a wee. You know?”
Anyway, teeth now brushed (“I couldn’t not!”), we start with Hollywood. While she was there, she had tea with Michelle Monaghan, her White Lotus co-star. “And she told me, ‘This might be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. You’ve just got to juice it.’”
Wood knew what she was signing up for when she auditioned for a role in the third series of Mike White’s award-laden drama, which has propelled the British actors Leo Woodall, Theo James and Will Sharpe to global stardom. Wood, who was a “superfan” of the show, hunted down the audition and was euphoric when she got the part — but the hype has been hard to handle.
“I have resistance to the buzz. I’ll stay at home and I won’t go to the party because I’m scared that I can’t handle my feelings of being overwhelmed,” she says. “Now that I’ve started to let it in a bit more, it’s like a bender: just do the thing, accept the tiredness, have fun and then process it later. It is a little bit of a British thing: we’re all embarrassed about saying, ‘This is a moment in my life.’”
In The White Lotus, a murder mystery set in Thailand — imagine Agatha Christie meets Condé Nast Traveller, with added spice — Wood plays Chelsea, the spiritual, sunny, straight-talking girlfriend of Rick (Walton Goggins), a taciturn older man. One day on set White told Goggins that Rick was the coolest character there has ever been on the show.
Aimee Lou Wood as Chelsea in The White Lotus
ALAMY
“I have resistance to the buzz. I’ll stay at home and I won’t go to the party”
ROSALINE SHAHNAVAZ AT MONDAY ARTISTS, PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE FITZ, W1. HAIR BY BJORN KRISCHKER AT THE WALL GROUP USING OUAI, MAKE-UP BY GINA KANE AT CAREN USING CLÉ DE PEAU BEAUTÉ. STYLING BY FELICITY KAY; VEST: ARKET, JUMPER: LILYSILK, JEANS: DOEN, SHOES: VAGABOND
“I was like, ‘Hey! What about Chelsea?’ And he said, ‘She’s the warmest.’” She beams. “She’s not cool, she’s not poised, she’s not posing like the others. She’s just experiencing. So I can just unmask in a weird way. I actually felt more myself as Chelsea because she was the goofy, nerdy side of me that sometimes I try to suppress. Mike was really great at saying, ‘Don’t be afraid to be unlike everyone else. Unleash the freak!’”
As time went on, though, she started to wonder if she should look “more Hollywood”. “One day the camera guy came up to me, and said” — she adopts an earnest American accent — “‘That choice you made with Chelsea’s run? Genius.’ And I was, like, ‘Frank, that’s my run. I didn’t make a choice, I just ran.’” Another night, she, Goggins and fellow cast members Leslie Bibb (“My best friend!”) and Carrie Coon went to the beach “to howl at the moon. So much fun.” And Goggins drawled: “You gotta show the girls Chelsea’s run.” Wood says: “It’s just the way I run! It’s like when you’re a kid, you don’t know you’re weird until someone points it out, do you?”
She laughs, but it is not unlike what’s happening with her teeth, she says. Wood has perfect, slightly prominent white teeth, with a delicate gap between the front two. But you needn’t trust my untrained eyes — on TikTok there are now orthodontists explaining Wood’s “diastema” and “incompetent lips”. The New York Times has run a piece about her “natural smile” and Vanity Fair has declared Wood’s teeth “inspiring”. “It’s, like, cool, and now I want to stop f***ing talking about it. Can I talk about my character? Why am I talking about my gnashers? It’s like now I’m just a pair of front teeth.”
“I got diagnosed a few years ago with ADHD with autistic traits”
ROSALINE SHAHNAVAZ
It is quite weird, I say, that the two talking points of a show that dissects, among other big themes, wealth, wellness, relationships and spirituality, have ended up being body parts — Wood’s “un-American” teeth and whether or not Jason Isaacs wore a prosthetic penis. “I understand what it represents. People feel more confident about their imperfections. It does feel a bit weird that the thing I got bullied for is now the thing that everyone’s, like, ‘woo!’” she says, clapping. “It’s still the thing that’s defining me.”
Over seven months the cast filmed and lived at the Four Seasons in Koh Samui, where they were the only guests. It sounds like the dream job, but as in the show, it was tinged with something more complex.
“The thing that I craved the most was a kitchen,” Wood says. “I wanted to be able to walk to the shops and buy groceries and make food. My self-esteem wasn’t great because I wasn’t being a normal person. I wasn’t doing my own washing, folding my clothes. I started to feel like I was in The Sims.”
It didn’t help that all the cast started to merge with their characters. “There was a bit of leakage. We were all accidentally Method.” Some nights they’d be sitting around at dinner and realise they’d just regurgitated a character’s speech. “It has happened every season. Everyone has lost their marbles a little bit.”
As Sally Bowles in Cabaret
For Wood, an actress who tends to live her characters to a slightly dangerous degree anyway — playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret in the West End in 2023 “almost killed” her, she says — it was particularly disconcerting. “Sometimes I feel like I can experience more of a range of emotions as a character in someone else’s story than as myself,” she says, meticulously picking the peel off a single grape.
Certainly you get the impression that work/life balance isn’t something Wood has quite got the hang of, but perhaps this is what makes her so magnetic on screen. The other day she got up to go to work — “Another day of getting in the car, going to set, getting your hair and make-up, face touched the whole day, body touched the whole day,” she slaps herself around the face, “get home, go to sleep, get back up, do the same thing” — when she saw a group of friends having brunch at a gym.
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“I just wanted to burst into tears. I want to sit with my friends and have a chat and do a Pilates class. Oh my God, that must feel like the best thing in the world, to have the choice.”
Wood was born in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in 1994 to a mother who worked for Childline and a father who sold cars and was an addict: he’d go out for a pint and not come back for ten days. As a child Wood struggled with debilitating shyness and an eating disorder. “I was almost mute, very socially anxious. I couldn’t sit down and eat a meal. My mum had to leave food around the house and I’d have to snack around. Now I know it was neurodivergence.”
She couldn’t work out why she found things that everyone else thought easy hard, and vice versa. “I got diagnosed a few years ago with ADHD with autistic traits. But then it’s been advised that I should go for an autism assessment,” she says. “They think that maybe it’s autism that’s leading the charge, and the ADHD is almost a by-product of the masking.”
With Asa Butterfield in Sex Education
NETFLIX
When her mother remarried she went to the private Cheadle Hulme school and got into acting. It came out of nowhere, she says. “Boom! I’m going to play Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls!” Rada followed and soon after that her first TV role, in Netflix’s Sex Education. She played Aimee and appeared in the opening scene naked, having sex with the headmaster’s son, played by Connor Swindells (who became her off-screen boyfriend for a couple of years). “I remember feeling quite vulnerable after Sex Education. If it had been all of us getting our boobs out, then I would feel better. It felt like I was the one that had done the freakiest stuff.”
As the viewing figures crept above 50 million, she started to feel uncomfortable off-screen, to the extent that she would dress quirkily, frumpily even, when she went out — if she went out at all. “When I was younger and I was dealing with my eating stuff, it was my worst nightmare to get my body out. But I’d worked through that stuff — and then I was back to covering up. I look back and there was so much in the way that I started to desexualise myself. Sometimes you just want to put on a sexy dress and be a siren, but I denied myself that.”
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It was a different experience on The White Lotus, where the female stars discussed their sex scenes at length. “Down to Carrie [Coon] saying, ‘No, I’m getting mine out.’ When she goes topless in the pool, that is such a moment for [her character] Laurie,” Wood says. “We were having these really helpful chats so I felt less alone, to the point where, when I knew the episode was coming out that had my sex scene in, I didn’t even think about it.”
With David Morrissey in Daddy Issues
BBC
Recently she has played mothers too. In Toxic Town, Jack Thorne’s harrowing Netflix drama about the Corby toxic waste scandal (inspired by Sunday Times reporting), she played Tracey Taylor, whose daughter Shelby Anne died at four days old. And she has just finished filming the second series of Daddy Issues, a BBC sitcom in which she plays a young woman who moves back in with her feckless dad, Malcolm (David Morrissey), when she gets pregnant. The first series ended with her giving birth; now she’s playing a mother. “The chaperone who works with the babies said to me, ‘Most actresses just give them back like they’re a prop. The way that you’ve connected with them … you’re going to be such a good mum.’ That felt like an achievement — it made me cry. When someone says something nice to me about my nature, it goes in.”
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Wood has also written her first show, having always wanted to be, she says, Emily Brontë — to “have a cosy house with a fire, with a cosy husband, and just sit and write and my friends come over for dinner”. Film Club, a six-part BBC comedy, is about a young woman who is agoraphobic, goes home to live with her mother and starts a film club in her garage.
“Something’s happened to me, being 31. I’ve always said I feel like a bit of a passenger in life: things have happened to me, it’s just weird coincidences. Playing Chelsea has helped me work this out. This notion that it’s fate is magical, but it can also feel like it’s all just been written for you.”
So, yes, Chelsea has changed her life in more ways than one. Tomorrow night Wood will watch the final episode of The White Lotus, along with everyone else. “I’m scared to watch it, actually. Because even though I know what happens,” she says, sighing, “seeing it out will be a lot.”
The White Lotus series finale is on Sky Atlantic/Now on Apr 7
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