Aimee Lou Wood Checks Out of The White Lotus

This article contains spoilers for the final episode of The White Lotus.

A weird thing happened to Aimee Lou Wood when she started filming The White Lotus in Thailand: she became aware of her own weirdness. She arrived at the Four Seasons Koh Samui in February 2024, having just turned 30 and with a part in a show of which she was a “superfan”. Chelsea, a Mancunian yoga teacher who is partial to a wine, came to her in an unconscious flow. She didn’t even have to think, she could simply be. “She’s an Aries,” Wood says frankly. “She’s very action-led.”

But then, as happens to the characters in showrunner Mike White’s Greek-tragedy-meets-reality-TV show, mosquito-like feelings of doubt and paranoia started to buzz around her head. People on set would tell her how funny she was being, and she really hadn’t been aware she was. When she thought too much about it, it made it difficult to repeat the trick. One day, Wood filmed a scene where Chelsea runs towards her taciturn older boyfriend Rick, played by Walton Goggins. “Frank, the cameraman, goes ‘That choice you made with the weird run? That is genius,’” she says. “And I’m going, “Frank, that’s my run.”

I first meet Wood in mid-March, the morning after the sixth episode of The White Lotus dropped, breaking records for the most-watched episode of the show ever. She arrives demonstrating that run, late, barreling towards me with the ends of her dark hair still wet, and wearing a fuzzy yellow sweater with a baby deer on the front. She plops down next to me on a bench outside a southeast London “shoppy shop”. Inside are rows of ceramic jars of French mustard and sacks of tiny onions hanging from shelves.

Looking back, the moment that really got into her head was when a producer approached her at the end of the first week of filming. “Someone told me how much Mike had fought for me. They said ‘it had to be you, no matter what HBO said.’ It was honestly from the nicest place, but my little head goes: ‘HBO didn’t want me. And I know why HBO didn’t want me, it’s because I’m ugly. Mike had to say ‘Please let me have the ugly girl!’” she laughs. “That was the thing that was in my head.”

It made her worry she was weird which, ironically, made her unable to convey that weirdness—the very quality White had recognized in her as being Chelsea and wanted her to go for. Don’t get in the way of your weirdness, he told her, be freaky! But from then on, and while living in a hotel for seven months, it was difficult to get a grip on reality. “It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It did feel like a bit of a social experiment,” she says. With White’s background in reality TV (he was a contestant on Survivor and The Amazing Race) you have to wonder if this intense living arrangement is in part engineered to bring out the twitchy and deranged performances that cast members have turned in over the years.