Aimee Lou Wood doesn’t deal in platitudes. “I’m so tired. I have to take some time to myself or my mind will explode,” she says, when I ask how she is doing. “Well, really it implodes. I turn everything in on myself and get so spirally– a lot of that is repressed rage…”
Wood exhibits the same candour in person as she does in her various on-screen characters: Sex Education’s charmingly naive Aimee (for which she won a Bafta in 2021); her heartbreaking Sonya in Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2020; her sunny Miss Harris opposite Bill Nighy in the 2022 film Living; and her acclaimed Sally Bowles in Cabaret in London’s West End a year later. “I was really lucky to have this fantastic teacher at Rada who would always say, “Just tell the truth. All of the other stuff will come, but just tell the truth,” she recalls. “I’m not sure I know any other way to act.”
This emotive authenticity was channelled in her most recent role: the infectiously good-natured Chelsea in season three of The White Lotus, which earnt her our award for Television Actress. Although Brits have appeared on the show before, she is the only one thus far to have kept her accent. She auditioned with a California twang, but the creator Mike White was so taken with her Manchester cadences, he rewrote the character’s backstory.
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“Before it came out, everyone told me my life was going to change because the show is American, and it’s so big,” says Wood. They were right. One of our most beloved home-grown talents is now a bona fide international star – and her rise to fame has come with both challenges and rewards. She has been met with feverish fan excitement (“I was in New York right before the final episode and people were literally screaming at me in the street saying, ‘Say it isn’t you! Tell me you don’t die!’”) and intense media scrutiny. There was fervent speculation about a fractious relationship with her on-screen boyfriend Walton Goggins after the actor unfollowed her on Instagram, as well as a flood of stories following her dignified response to a Saturday Night Live skit making fun of her teeth. At the time, she criticised the sketch as being “mean and unfunny”, reposting an observation by another Instagram account that said it was taking “a screeching turn into 1970s misogyny”. The show bosses apologised and the actress who portrayed her, Sarah Sherman, sent Wood flowers.
Dress, vest, bra, socks, heels, all Miu Miu. White gold and diamond necklace, from a selection, De Beers.
But the past year has also been nothing short of a professional triumph. In September, she became the latest face of the fashion brand Chloé and was also nominated for an Emmy. Attending the awards ceremony, she looked the picture of Hollywood glamour, walking down the red carpet in a strapless pink McQueen gown and appearing at a star-studded after-party at Los Angeles’ exclusive San Vicente Bungalows. True to form, however, she ended her night doing exactly what she wanted: watching ET in bed.
Stepping away from the whirlwind of the Hollywood circuit in this way is part of Wood’s coping mechanism. “I find LA emotionally bulimic, and I say that as an ex-bulimic,” she observes. “It is this super-sized adventure where everyone’s talking about you all the time and you have to talk about yourself all the time. And then I leave, and I want to throw it all up.”
Certainly, LA feels far removed from Stockport, where Wood was born in 1994. She grew up in the village of Bramhall with her mother, who worked for Childline, and her father, a car dealer. They divorced when she was young, largely on account of her father’s issues with alcoholism and drug addiction. Her mother remarried and her stepfather paid for her to attend Cheadle Hulme, a private school in Greater Manchester. Acting quickly became an escape for Wood, who encountered merciless bullying from classmates who would call her Bugs Bunny and make fun of her accent. She went on to study at the Oxford School of Drama and then Rada, followed by three years of stage work, including runs at the Almeida and a UK tour of the powerful play People, Places and Things. All would lead to an audition for the taboo-busting hit Netflix series Sex Education.
Top, Toteme. White gold and diamond earrings, from a selection, De Beers.
“Acting has always been a safe place for me to work out my feelings,” says Wood. “I think for that reason a role will hit me in the heart, in the gut.” When she signed up for The White Lotus, the prospect of filming in a bikini brought back old and unwelcome body dysmorphia, which she suffered from throughout her teenage years. Adopting her character’s confidence suddenly became emboldening. “I shook myself out of it by thinking, ‘It’s not about whether Aimee wants to show her body or not – Chelsea does.'”
Indeed, Chelsea has had an indelible effect on Wood. “The line between me and her started to blur,” she admits. The shoot was a fully immersive seven months in Thailand, where the cast lived and worked together in almost total isolation, at times suffering from heat exhaustion and food poisoning, and she says it took time for her to move on from the experience. “I need to do rituals to shed a character. But if I say something like that to my mum and her friends, they’ll reply, ‘Oi, she’s been in London for a bit too long, fucking hell…'” She tells me that her boyfriend, the actor Adam Long, has pointed out she has form for experiencing intense osmosis with her characters. “He’s right. The same thing happened when I played Sally Bowles. She had a nervous breakdown, so I felt like I had a nervous breakdown.”
Mental health and body image are just some of the causes on which Wood has taken a public stance over the past year. She has used Instagram – where she now has three million followers – to speak up about her life-changing recent diagnosis of ADHD with autistic traits – information that is helping her to manage day-to-day situations that she finds challenging. The week before our interview, she started to panic while filming an emotional scene in her latest film, Anxious People (co-starring Angelina Jolie), due to the number of crew members shouting at her. She stood up for herself and told them what she needed to focus: one direction, one voice, no hand movements in her line of sight. “I’ve spent years feeling unable to say anything like that for fear of seeming argumentative – but now I feel like I can take ownership of what I need to thrive, and tell people what won’t work for me,” she says. “When I spoke up, all I could see was Angelina giving me a thumbs up. She’s possibly the most famous woman ever, but she’s so normal. I’m fairly certain she drives herself to set each day…”
Bodysuit, Dolce & Gabbana. White gold and diamond necklace; matching ring, both from a selection, De Beers. Tights, Falke. Heels, Roger Vivier.
Wood’s latest project, Film Club, is perhaps her most personal yet. She has co-written and created the six-part comedy series for the BBC with her drama-school friend, the actor Ralph Davis; it is the story of a young woman, Evie (played by Wood), who moves home following a mental-health crisis and finds herself unable to leave the house. Instead, she creates a weekly film club in her mother’s garage with her best friend Noa. The idea originated in lockdown – “when movies were all we had to get us through” – and Wood and Davis have been working on it ever since.
It is an assured debut, with sparkling dialogue and great central performances from a stellar cast that includes Suranne Jones, Nabhaan Rizwan and Owen Cooper, a then-unknown young actor. “He kept telling us he’d done this thing called Adolescence but really played it down!” she says. (Wood cheered loudly when Cooper won an Emmy for his part in it: “I loved the fact that I was nominated for my most American project ever and not only did we win nothing, I was sat with a bunch of Northern actors winning everything!”)
Dress, Chloé. White gold and diamond ring; matching earrings, both from a selection, De Beers.
Film Club may mark the beginning of a new career trajectory, though – one that Wood has secretly dreamt about for years. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be a writer. I didn’t really want to be an actor,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t really understand how I got here!” She tells me her plan is to run away to Cornwall – a favourite retreat – as soon as possible, to write something new.
Before she can, there is Anxious People to finish filming, the release of the next season of Daddy Issues, the charming BBC comedy in which Wood co-stars with David Morrissey, and a promotional tour for The Idiots, a darkly funny film based on the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s wife Anna. “That was 100 per cent my favourite job I’ve done,” she says. “I look the worst I’ve ever looked on camera, but I did not have a self-conscious thought at any point during that filming. It was such a safe and creative set.”
Wood tells me her ideal day would be spent waking up late in her south-east-London flat for a morning coffee and a stroll before an afternoon of reading or watching films, while her boyfriend slow-cooks a roast and hides her phone. “A day when you can just switch off from the world and have a nice potter,” she reflects. “That’s really all I want.” Somehow, I think life may bring her more than that.
‘Daddy Issues’ season 2 is released on BBC iPlayer from 21 November. ‘Film Club’ is available on BBC iPlayer. ‘The White Lotus’ season 3 is available on Now TV.
The original interview was published in the Dec/Jan issue of Harper’s Bazaar, celebrating our Women of the Year.
