It doesn’t take long to realise astrology is important to Aimee Lou Wood. She offers to read my birth chart and describes the new season of The White Lotus as having ‘strong Scorpio energy — it’s the underworld, it’s the buried truth, it’s like still waters run deep’.
This month sees Wood appear as Chelsea in the return of the wildly successful hit HBO series, this time set in a luxury hotel in Thailand, and satirising the wellness industry and spirituality. Working on the show was an immersive experience unlike anything Wood had undertaken before. Filming took place on location in an isolated part of Koh Samui, Thailand, for seven months last year; Wood describes it as a ‘social experiment’ akin to The Truman Show and received advice from previous cast member Leo Woodall on how to navigate it.
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‘This season feels different in a great way,’ she says. ‘Mike [White, the show’s creator] just nails people. He nails our awful habits and our egos with this humour and specificity that is just so alarming.’ Careful not to reveal too much, Wood says: ‘Chelsea isn’t staff, but she’s also not a guest. She feels a bit like the audience: we’re visiting The White Lotus, but it’s not really where we belong.’
This month also sees Wood portray a mother fighting for justice in Netflix’s Toxic Town, a four-part drama based on the true story of how toxic waste affected the East Midlands town of Corby. And with her screenwriting debut Film Club having just finished shooting in Manchester, Wood’s hometown, and her BBC comedy series Daddy Issues being recommissioned for a second series, there’s been little time for the actor to pause and take stock.
‘It’s all been so much bigger and more abundant and overwhelming than I ever thought it would be,’ says 30-year-old Wood, who graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2017 and hasn’t stopped working since. Her debut performance as lovable Aimee Gibbs in Sex Education garnered critical praise, and she’s taken on demanding stage roles as hardworking Sonya in Uncle Vanya and enigmatic Sally Bowles in Cabaret. ‘Underneath all of these characters and these stories and these experiences, who the hell am I?’ she asks. ‘I don't think I really know. That's what this year is going to be. Getting real is 2025.’
A pink, ‘A’-shaped badge is fastened to Aimee Lou Wood’s leopard print shoulder bag, glinting in the light as she shows it to me. Both badge and bag were gifts from Suranne Jones, who stars in Wood’s upcoming debut screenwriting project, Film Club. ‘Suranne told me to put in the bag the things that make me feel most like me, like a picture of my friends, and bring it on jobs with me,’ says Wood fondly. ‘That’s a really big thing I’ve learned about myself that I want to implement: you have to come back to yourself and come back to the real world.’
That blurring between fiction and reality has often been a struggle for Wood to process — both in her own approach to characters and the way audiences perceive them. ‘For the longest time, everyone thought that I was Aimee Gibbs. But Aimee was, in many ways, the most far away from me,’ says Wood, before noting her similarities with her White Lotus character. ‘Chelsea might be the one I feel most claustrophobic with.’
It’s not just the character, but the overall experience of working on The White Lotus, that was unlike anything Wood had undertaken before. Already a fan of the show, Wood had always wanted to be part of it but wasn’t sure where she would fit. With the role of Chelsea, it all clicked. ‘It became so meta,’ she says of filming the new series. ‘There were times when we'd be out for dinner and someone would start accidentally, verbatim, saying their lines from the show. It all became so merged and so confused, and it was amazing. It was the most magical, wild experience, and such deep friendships were formed.’ And how is the new season of The White Lotus going to be different? ‘There’s a lot of humanity in it. I hope that it’s going to thrill and excite people as much as the previous ones, but there is an added depth.’
Now Wood is trying to get into the habit of listening to her first instincts and namechecks Helen McCrory and Michaela Coel as inspirations for ways to approach her work. She’s looking to spend more time writing, which motivated her most when she was first starting out. ‘It does feel more me. I don’t want to be in the next thing I write, I just want to write. And I'd love to be a showrunner.’
She says she particularly respected the way Coel has dealt with attention: ‘I literally go back to Michaela Coel and her talking about how when I May Destroy You came out, everyone was like “you’ve got to monopolise now,” and that’s when she went and travelled the world and took some space. And I think that’s so powerful. And so I think that my dream is that I’ll be able to have the willpower to do a bit of a Michaela’.
Wood is also trying to move away from talking about her own mental health (she has spoken previously about her experience with body dysmorphia and eating disorders) as if it’s an intellectual subject, but instead as her reality. ‘I’m like, “no, accept the brain that you’ve got and now start living for that truth,”’ she says. ‘I am someone who has so many fucking mental illnesses, and there’s nothing wrong with being mentally ill.’ She recalls a meeting with a psychic who told her, ‘As long as you stay in reality, the world is your oyster.’ Thinking about that encounter anchors Wood in the places she feels most like herself — with her friends, in therapy, at her flat in south east London — it’s a pearl of wisdom indeed.
Aimee Lou Wood’s personal style mirrors the sense of ease she brings to her roles. Her approach to beauty is no exception. Throughout, she wears Lancôme’s Teint Idole Ultra Wear Care & Glow Serum Concealer, £31, and Skin Transforming Highlighter, £45, for a masterful ‘no make-up’ make-up look.
Photography: Lulu McArdle, Styling: Natasha Wray, Hair: Halley Brisker at The Wall Group, Make up: Lucy Burt at The Wall Group using Lancôme, Nails: Sabrina Gayle at ARCH, Styling Assistant: Sabrina Leina, Movement Director: Liam Hill at Dust Bunnies.
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