If you’ve even remotely engaged with television over the past couple of years, you’ll have heard of Aimee Lou Wood.
The Stockport-born actress has quickly risen to household-name status thanks to her captivating and nuanced roster of characters, debuting her charm in Netflix’s Sex Education before endearing herself to the hearts of viewers as Chelsea in the third season of The White Lotus — no small feat amongst a stellar Hollywood cast that included Walter Goggins, Leslie Bibb and Jason Isaacs.
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Yet taking on the responsibility of such characters can manifest as a double-edged sword, as the Bazaar Women of the Year winner explained in her recent cover interview. For Wood, the process of embodying a character as wholly as she did with Chelsea — The White Lotus cast spent seven months fully immersed in Thailand with only each other and the crew — can lead to partial osmosis. “The line between me and her started to blur,” she told Bazaar. “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…'”
Though the actress admits difficulty in setting boundaries when it comes to the crafting of her characters (“The same thing happened when I played Sally Bowles. She had a nervous breakdown, so I felt like I had a nervous breakdown,”), Wood is learning to speak up for herself. Earlier this year, she criticised Saturday Night Live as “mean and unfunny” after the US comedy show put out a sketch making fun of her teeth — a feature that in turn became celebrated by women across social media as a welcome reprieve from the ubiquitous Hollywood veneers and an embrace of natural, unique beauty.
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Wood is showing up for herself on set too. One of her upcoming projects, Anxious People, sees her star opposite Angelina Jolie in a dark comedy. Though some may have shrunk at the thought of working with such an established Hollywood name, the film presented Wood with an opportunity to do the very thing women have been so heavily programmed against in the industry: say no.
The Sex Education star recounts being shouted at by multiple crew members during an emotional scene in the film, to which she responded decisively, telling them exactly what she required to do her job properly: in this instance, 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 explains. “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…”
Given the magnitude of success she’s experienced in the past few years, there’s no doubt that Wood’s path could easily lead to Hollywood, should she so choose. But for now, the British star prefers the leafy streets of south-east London, describing her ideal 24 hours as “a day when you can just switch off from the world and have a nice potter”.
“I find LA emotionally bulimic, and I say that as an ex-bulimic,” she says. “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.”
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