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The best actors in Hollywood have a quirk that sets them apart from the rest: a crooked nose, a luscious mane of hair, maybe a bit of a smirk. When I sit down at a café in South East London with actress Aimee Lou Wood, prominent, perfect squares prod gently out of her mouth as she smiles. They serve her well: It was her conspicuously British teeth, she claims, that helped her land the role of Chelsea, a head-in-the-clouds, spiritually curious, astrology-obsessed young Brit vacationing in Thailand, in season three of HBO’s The White Lotus. A fan of Jennifer Coolidge’s performance on the first two seasons of Mike White’s watercooler-chat hit, she “was desperate to do some of those simmering, tense, yucky scenes,” Wood says, once we’ve settled in among the dogs and babies at the café. “But I just couldn’t see where I fit at all.”
Wood, who is best known for the three seasons she spent playing a girl also named Aimee, the gawky, sweet fan favorite of Netflix’s Sex Education, is often cast as a shade of herself: gesticulating and high-spirited, someone whose deep-rooted thoughtfulness and intelligence is mildly masked by the fact that she can really hold a conversation with anyone. When she auditioned for The White Lotus, Chelsea’s background had yet to be determined, so the actress submitted her tape two ways, as requested — one with an American accent, the other with her own Mancunian dialect. “I was like, If they’re resolute on this character being American, I won’t get it, because no one will ever believe me as an American,” she says, flashing her grin. “It’s the teeth!”
Chelsea wound up being from Manchester in the end. An outsider, she arrives at the resort not as a guest but as a guest of a guest, and she is almost too nice to be in the company of these chillingly uniform tourists with bright-white veneers. After she got the part, Wood was told that the producers wanted “someone who had a young, unbothered, Goldie Hawn kind of vibe,” she says. “Someone who’s seeing all these red flags and yet is going through life like …” She acts out an exaggerated version of her character, rolling her doe-ish, tawny eyes back and flipping her roasted-chestnut-colored hair a little: “La-la-la-la-la!”
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The White Lotus, a prestige television series from a maverick show runner with a shoot that involves spending months in a sun-dappled location, is the type of project an actor would never want to turn down. White has become revered for casting fabulous midlife actresses (Coolidge, Connie Britton, Carrie Coon, Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan) and giving them meaty material. Opposite them — sometimes in direct conflict — are the talented young actors who appear in what some might write off as teen fodder. In the past, White has seen beyond the stereotypes of characters played by Sydney Sweeney and Meghann Fahy and given them room to show their true range as performers.
Wood is up next. Days after she turned 30, in February 2024, she left the Southeast London flat that she shared with her theater-school friend Alfie and headed to the Four Seasons Koh Samui resort in Thailand to film the show’s third season. The production took over the entire resort, becoming the shooting location for the majority of its scenes. The actors stayed there, too. “You’re on the beach having a lovely time and then, all of a sudden, you spot the lights!” she says, comparing the shoot to The Truman Show or the reality series Big Brother, where real life and screen life bled into one.
Wood’s character, Chelsea, is on a trip with her older, work-driven, emotionally aloof boyfriend Rick, played by Walton Goggins. Chelsea reminded the actress of her friends with those kinds of boyfriends; the girls who seemingly smile through their partner’s banal personalities. “The ones who say, ‘You’re gonna love him! Wait till you meet him!’” Wood says. “And then they bring him [to a party] and he doesn’t say ‘hello’ to anyone.”
Before The White Lotus, Wood had worked almost exclusively in the U.K. She soaked up the sensibility of her mostly American colleagues, their gung ho, “unapologetic” attitude toward their work that, until then, she hadn’t really exercised as a bashful Brit. Wood quickly bonded with the cast, but getting some time to herself was sacred. “After we’d had a day on set, it’d be normal for everyone to go grab some cocktails or whatever,” the actress says. She eventually became known among her castmates as “the fox” who would “come out for some scraps and then go back inside” when her co-star, Lisa — the “down to earth” Blackpink superstar who plays a resort employee on the show — would invite people to her room to listen to music, or when Patrick Schwarzenegger — who plays the pervy, arrogant Saxon Ratliff — would beg her to hang out. “I’d be like, ‘I need to go into my cave,’” Wood says, laughing. “What have you been doing in there?” he’d ask. She would retort, sardonically, “Just having loads of realizations and epiphanies about myself, life, and the world, and stewing in them.”
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After several months, she reached the point where she was wrestling to stay sane and grounded while playing an eternally airy-fairy character. “I think Aimee,” she says, speaking about herself in the third person, “was a bit of a storm cloud, because when I was Chelsea, I was so up that I needed someone to bring me back down.” Her accent brought her home; it helped her ground Chelsea, too. “There’s a front-footedness to us,” Wood says of Manchester locals, “and a warmth.”
Born in Stockport, Wood was raised in the parish of Bramhall as a teenager after her parents divorced. She moved from a state-school education to private school because her mother’s boyfriend offered to pay for it. There — with her thicker accent — she found herself out of place. Some classmates teased her by calling her “Bugs Bunny.” “I didn’t actually ever want to be an actor,” she says, tossing her hands up. “That was just something that got way out of control. It was like a coping mechanism for me being bullied.” She joined drama clubs and played Miss Adelaide in Guys & Dolls. With low self esteem, she became anxious, developing unhealthy eating habits and OCD. She’s still fighting the latter. “It’s such a mean one, because it attacks when you’ve had a good time,” she says. Today, Wood credits two books, Lee Baer’s The Imp of the Mind and Robert Wilson and David Veale’s Overcoming Health Anxiety, with helping her to make sense of her mental health.
After graduating high school, Wood landed a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. When she first moved to London, she’d try to speak to people in the queues at grocery stores and they’d look at her strangely, thrown off by her geniality. RADA taught Wood how to speak in perfect RP (received pronunciation) English, as if she stemmed from royalty. But somehow her “kooky” qualities meant she could never escape being seen as “comedy gold,” even when she wasn’t trying to be funny. After filming the first season of Sex Education in Wales in 2018, she had a quick stint at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, where she played the nonplussed co-worker of a convicted sex offender in Downstate, a dark and intense play about convicted pedophiles living in a group home together after serving their sentences.
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By the time that play reached London’s National Theatre in the spring of 2019, over 40 million people had watched Sex Education in its first month on Netflix, and hundreds of thousands of fans followed its new stars on Instagram. Wood’s life changed almost immediately. “I was sat in the bar with [the Downstate cast], and this school trip went past, and they started banging on the window and screaming. What was so weird was that the teacher didn’t stop them. They were all just taking photos of me, sitting there.” Months earlier, she’d had the same post-show debriefs in Chicago and had been completely unbothered by anyone. But now, she felt like public property. In its three-season run, Sex Education racked up 15 TV BAFTA nominations. Only one of them transformed into a win: Wood’s Best Female Comedy Performance prize in 2021.
The attention ebbed and flowed depending on when a new season of the show was available. Sex Education was big, but its popularity felt localized, and she didn’t think too much about how people might perceive her online despite gaining hundreds of thousands of new followers. But she would later learn just how closely she was being scrutinized. In October 2023, Wood was one of the few people in the public eye who spoke out on social media about the persecution of Palestinian people in the wake of October 7. Hollywood was frozen in silence; many who raised their voices lost jobs and agents in the process. But for Wood, “it never felt like a choice,” she tells me.
On Instagram, barely a week after the attacks, she began reposting fundraisers and appeals for the Gaza humanitarian crisis and statistics on the rise in Islamophobic hate crimes in London. She couldn’t ignore it because what she was witnessing wasn’t news to her; it was a continuation of the stories her family had told her since she was young. “My grandad was a soldier in Palestine, the year before the Nakba,” she says. “He saw a lot of stuff that traumatized him for the rest of his life.” The backlash online came swiftly: The police came to her house, letting her know that the threats she was receiving were likely to have real-world consequences and that she should be cautious. Her agents received printed screenshots of her Instagram feed, highlighting the fundraisers she was sharing for people living in Gaza. Wood says the things that scare her in life are facile, like “buying bread in the supermarket” or “not having mascara on my bottom lashes.” But “when something’s fucking like, real and true,” she says, “the fear just goes.”
When Wood walked back into her bedroom after shooting The White Lotus, seven months had passed outside of the strange static bubble she’d lived in at the resort. The banners from her birthday in February were still hanging ceremoniously, and a little sadly, in her room. She was relieved to be home, but didn’t take much of a break: She went straight into writing a television series, Film Club, which she’ll also star in later this year when it airs on BBC, and started preparing to do press for Toxic Town, a drama series based on the 2009 toxic-waste case in Corby, England, now streaming on Netflix.
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Sometimes Wood thinks about what life would be like if she could slow down entirely, or stop acting altogether. Recently, she’s had a stunningly simple realization: “You can actually do what you want.” The combination of both writing and acting in her own show spun her out so badly that she fainted in the shower one day from the stress. When she made her childhood dreams come true by playing Sally Bowles in the West End staging of Cabaret in 2023, for example, she was elated, but it had such a knock-on effect on her body that she can barely think about how she’d ever do it all again. “I have a whole fantasy recently that I could open a bookshop in Cornwall, and I’ll write,” she says. She talks clear-mindedly to herself for me: “You are still young, and you do have your whole life ahead of you. You can choose what way that life goes, and you have agency.”
Getting older doesn’t scare Wood. Thirty-one has a really lovely ring to it: less pressure than 30, more developed than 29 (“Saturn return is real,” she says). She’s doing this retroactive reassessment of the person she was as a teenager — a little more fragmented, but determined. Back then, her ego was at war with itself. Maybe it’s an ongoing battle somewhere inside of her: quieter, like the inner, muffled layer of a matryoshka. “I want you to look at me, but I actually don’t — I want to be left alone,” she remembers her teen self thinking. She peers across the table at me. “I think that weird dichotomy still lives in me somewhere.”
Production Credits
- Photography by Yasmine Dibu
- Styling by Shiva Mizani
- Hair: Lauren Palmer-Smith
- Makeup: Ciara Maccaro
- Production Assistant: Ziara Galindo
- The Cut, Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples
- The Cut, Photo Director Noelle Lacombe
- The Cut, Photo Editor Maridelis Morales Rosado
