‘The White Lotus' star Aimee Lou Wood on the social media drama: ‘It's been scary, overwhelming, and difficult'
The past two months have been quite the roller-coaster for Aimee Lou Wood.
She'd barely had a moment to process the fallout from the season finale of The White Lotus, which claimed the life of her fatally doomed character Chelsea, before she got caught up in a swirl about an insensitive Saturday Night Live sketch. And then there was "The Great Unfollowing," the social media obsession about why her White Lotus costar Walton Goggins was no longer tracking her Instagram posts.
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"I've never experienced anything like this before, so I'm kind of learning along the way," Woods tells Gold Derby. "But the wake of it has been a lot."
Here, she reveals how she's learned to deal with the impact of her newfound notoriety, the advice costar Parker Posey gave her, and why she always knew that Chelsea was going to die.
Gold Derby: I feel like you've lived two lives — the show life and then the post-show life.
Aimee Lou Wood: That is so weird that you say that because I've just been talking about that. It's felt like two chapters of a very complex, amazing, confronting, challenging story. I've had to hold a multitude of truths to just be accepting of everything that's happening. Because it's all of it. You can't put it into a box. You just have to see it as a transformative experience because it is. It's amazing, and it's also been scary, overwhelming, and difficult because you're having to shift into a different way of living that you're kind of expected to know how to do it. But, of course, we don't know how to do it.
SEEAimee Lou Wood is rising in the Emmy odds after the 'SNL' teeth joke
How are you taking care of yourself? Given the social media swirl of everything that you've been through since the show has ended, are you OK?
I am OK. Thank you for asking. That's so nice. God, that made me emotional. I spoke to Parker Posey today, and it was just the best chat because she just does it so right. She just doesn't engage with that. It's like, this is her experience. She is taking from this what Parker needs to take, rather than being at the mercy of other people's opinions. It's about her experience. I think that I'm good. I think that I've learned so much about people and about myself from the craziness of this. And for that, I'm really grateful, actually, and I've had reckonings in my life that I would never have had without this pressure cooker. So I think it's sped up my growing up process quite a lot.
Parker was, like, we're entertainers. Our job is to entertain, and then we become not entertaining because of how heavy some of the stuff can be, and actually you have to just be silly actors. We love pretending, and it's when you forget that, or when you lose track of that, that's when it becomes very confusing. You have to reconnect the fact that we're daft and we're silly and we tell stories, that's who we are. And actually, we're not designed for that other part of it. We're not designed for the social media, all of that stuff. That's a different job, that's a completely separate job, and a completely separate thing to the acting. That part is harder because it's not what is our element. I'm not in my element doing that. I'm in my element when I'm on set. I'm finding that moment in Chelsea's story. And I think, "Oh, I've just got to tell the truth here." And that's what I love. But the other stuff, it is a completely different skill.
You're only human at the end of the day, and so you have to find that right balance between the two.
You do. You really do. It's just taking it all the good and the bad, and then you can do it. Because at one point, it was a bit, like, everyone's coming at me. This is so overwhelming. It's like, actually, everyone's not coming at you, Aimee, they're coming at an idea of you. They're coming at Aimee Lou Wood, who's someone that they don't actually know, and someone that's not you. You're a concept to those people. You're a concept to those people commenting on social media; the people who love you and know you are still the same people. So actually, all of that stuff can't really touch Aimee because they don't know me. It's strangers, it's people who don't know me. Especially with a character like Chelsea, especially with the design of Mike [White]'s show and his casting, he wants people who are really close to their characters, who do share an essence with them. It becomes extremely personal, and then it's like, well, actually, the "you" that they're talking about isn't me. It's Chelsea. That's a really interesting thing to experience. Aimee starts feeling like a disappointment because she's not Chelsea, especially when it's a show that penetrates the zeitgeist this much. You start to feel like you don't belong to yourself.
I think that's what Parker was trying to say to me this morning. You can take from this what you need, what you want, to further your journey as a human being and as an actor. It doesn't have to be for anyone else. This is for you, so that then you get a sense of ownership back, rather than feeling like you're being owned by all the people who watch The White Lotus.
SEEAimee Lou Wood gets her flowers — literally — from 'SNL' star Sarah Sherman after 'mean and unfunny' sketch; Bowen Yang defends Wood's 'completely valid' reaction
I think there's also something about Chelsea inhabiting a world that's full of very unlikable characters, and she is probably the one fundamentally good people that exists in that world. How did you find your way into her?
I felt very deeply connected to her from the first read of the audition sides. I'd always wanted to be in White Lotus, and I just didn't know where I would fit. I would watch it, and I think I want to be in this show, and I want to work with Mike, but where the hell do I fit in this world? I don't feel like there's a way in. And then I saw these audition sides from Chelsea, and I was like, "This is the way in if it's going to be anything, it's going to be this." And so from the beginning, I just think I really understood her, and she really resonated with me, and I think Mike really just bolstered that. We didn't have many chats about Chelsea, intellectually, it was all very gut-driven. His thing was more telling me you already know…
...that she was going to die?
Yes. I did the scene where it said, "We're going to be together forever, don't you think?" And he says, "That's the plan." And she says, "Is it?" And as soon as I said those words, I knew it was them that died. I knew it was them. And Mike was like, "I think you're picking up on something here." And he told me. So I knew from the second time I ever spoke Chelsea's lines that she was the one who dies, and that Rick was too. And so you kind of have to put it out your mind while you're filming, because she doesn't know she's going to die, even though she does kind of have a connection to death that is quite strange, like she's kind of obsessed with it.
She keeps saying bad things happen in threes.
Yes, she references it a lot. So that was also helpful because it meant that I could know in the back of my mind because I think Chelsea knows in the back of hers. She knows that she's a person who cannot help but go towards danger. So she's very connected to her death drive, which is what makes her so alive as a person, because she thinks about death a lot, and she's close to it. So it means that she lives very courageously and very moment to moment. But it also is really sad because I felt like she was this person who just couldn't help but walk towards her own doom. And that reminds me of so many like women that I love, who I looked up to so much growing up, these kind of tragic heroines that were there. They were amazing and wonderful and brought so much light to the world, but also had this self-destruct button that they couldn't stop pressing, and it's part of what made them so alive and so interesting as artists, but it also meant that they didn't live.
I just always understood that Chelsea was someone who almost knew that she wasn't going to live that long, and so therefore, a relationship like hers and Rick's isn't really that scary to her because she's got that amor fati thing going on, which is, yeah, this is probably destructive, but that doesn't stop her from doing anything because she's already accepted that maybe her life isn't going to be a long one, and it's not going to be a cozy one and a safe one. It's going to be bright and fast.
What motivates her? Is it her love for Rick?
I think that with Chelsea, a thing that really helped me was her line about "bad things have happened to me too, and you don't see me walking around feeling sorry for myself" that she says to Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). And after I said that, I thought, Chelsea is running away from something. Chelsea is running away from a pain, just the same as Rick is, but the way that they deal with it is so different. And by pouring herself into Rick, she never has to look at her own stuff. It's all about his pain. She laments that to Chloe, but really she likes it that way because it means that she can just see and give and pour and not ever have to look in. It's all looking out. And that's why she's so confronted by Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) because trying to look at her, and she's like, "Whoa, no. That's not how I work. I do the looking." So I think that what motivates her is love for Rick, but it's also a really deep fear of sitting with herself. She does not want to sit with herself. She really doesn't. She doesn't want to feel the feelings. She's running away. She's gone traveling. She doesn't stop moving. She doesn't stop talking. She's constantly talking; words are her armor. She just chats, chats, chats, chats, chats.
And when she's lying on the floor at the end and she can't speak for the first time, Rick actually gets to see her almost more clearly than she's ever let him see her before because she's got nothing funny to say, nothing inquisitive to ask. She's just her, and he can see how much he adores her and loves her. She doesn't really let anyone properly get to know her. It's both adoration and love for Rick and a true belief that he's her soul mate. But it also means she avoids all responsibility because if it's written in the stars, if it's fate, then she doesn't have any responsibility. She doesn't have any choice. So it's done, it's written that whatever goes will go and I don't have any control over it. It's a very clever way to avoid ever growing up, facing your stuff, facing your feelings and taking responsibility because we're soul mates, so there's nothing I can do about it, and that's where her and Rick are so similar because Rick's like, "There's nothing I can do. This is my fate. I have to go and kill this man." No, you don't. You have free will, but both of them believe that their stories are already written and that they can't change it, and that's why they are the perfect storm.
SEEPatrick Schwarzenegger on pulling off Saxon's transformation in 'The White Lotus' Season 3
Do you think Saxon was truly changed by his encounter with Chelsea? Do you think she changed him?
I think that she did change him. I think she did, and I think that it wasn't even romantic. I think it was someone that he needed to meet on his spiritual journey. That just shocked him. He was in a script, and she just came and ripped up the pages of the script and went, "No, we don't follow that." I'm not doing those lines. It was the shock of this human that woke him up. I think that he thinks it's romantic because he doesn't know any other way to be with women. It has to be that there's some kind of object of desire to him if he's interested. But actually, what I think Saxon realizes over the course of the show is that he's so much more interested in what she has to say and what she has to teach than his own lust. I think they could have had a beautiful friendship. I think what's so sad is that both of them could have had a gorgeous friendship, but they were both blinkered by something that was stopping them from connecting fully to each other. If Saxon was brought up in a different family, he wouldn't be that guy. And if Chelsea had a different life, she wouldn't be that girl. So they kind of miss each other, when actually, by nature, they're probably very similar. They're determined. They both love their mantras. They both love spouting loads of knowledge, and they're both really trying in life. But their just conditioning has been so different that they think they're opposites, but they're actually so deeply similar, and I think they just see that at the end, and then it's too late.
What's one thing you took away from the experience?
I've learned so much. Probably one of the most profound life moments I ever had was watching Chelsea die, sitting with Charlotte and Patrick and all my friends, all these amazing friends that I've made, and going, "Oh, it's permission to let go of anything in Chelsea that was me, that was holding me back." Because she's so close to who I am, just getting to grow up for both of us, because the thing that Chelsea can't do is grow up. I think that it's made me more ready to be a grown-up. Who do I want to be as a person? Who do I want to be as a human being, and how do I want to live? Because I now have the privilege of getting to be a grown-up, and if I'd made a different step in my life when I was younger, I might have been a Chelsea. So seeing that unfold is really profound.
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