Aimee Lou Wood became one of the breakout stars of The White Lotus’s Season 3. It happened at a good time for her and her career – she already has a good body of work, she’s 31 years old and now she’s got huge global interest. She’s also very British, in that she seems content to be a normal jobbing-actor and she doesn’t have any particular dream of being a huge movie star. Aimee recently spoke to the Times about TWL and her life now, and she’s funny and charming. She and Jason Isaacs have both indicated that there were real beefs and fallouts as they filmed TWL, and currently, people are obsessed with knowing what went down between Aimee and Walton Goggins. Like… that man talks about Aimee like she’s his soulmate (and he’s married). She barely talks about him in this interview though. Some highlights:

She had tea with Michelle Monaghan recently in LA: “And she told me, ‘This might be a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. You’ve just got to juice it.’”

The buzz around her: “I have resistance to the buzz. I’ll stay at home and I won’t go to the party because I’m scared that I can’t handle my feelings of being overwhelmed. Now that I’ve started to let it in a bit more, it’s like a bender: just do the thing, accept the tiredness, have fun and then process it later. It is a little bit of a British thing: we’re all embarrassed about saying, ‘This is a moment in my life.’”

Working with Americans: “One day the camera guy came up to me, and said” — she adopts an earnest American accent — “‘That choice you made with Chelsea’s run? Genius.’ And I was, like, ‘Frank, that’s my run. I didn’t make a choice, I just ran.’” Another night, she, Goggins and fellow cast members Leslie Bibb (“My best friend!”) and Carrie Coon went to the beach “to howl at the moon. So much fun.” And Goggins drawled: “You gotta show the girls Chelsea’s run.” Wood says: “It’s just the way I run! It’s like when you’re a kid, you don’t know you’re weird until someone points it out, do you?”

Everyone talking about her teeth: “It’s, like, cool, and now I want to stop f***ing talking about it. Can I talk about my character? Why am I talking about my gnashers? It’s like now I’m just a pair of front teeth….I understand what it represents. People feel more confident about their imperfections. It does feel a bit weird that the thing I got bullied for is now the thing that everyone’s, like, ‘woo!’ It’s still the thing that’s defining me.”

Working for seven months at the Four Seasons in Koh Samui: “The thing that I craved the most was a kitchen. I wanted to be able to walk to the shops and buy groceries and make food. My self-esteem wasn’t great because I wasn’t being a normal person. I wasn’t doing my own washing, folding my clothes. I started to feel like I was in The Sims.”

Everyone went a bit bonkers: “There was a bit of leakage. We were all accidentally Method.” Some nights they’d be sitting around at dinner and realise they’d just regurgitated a character’s speech. “It has happened every season. Everyone has lost their marbles a little bit.”

She’s neurodivergent: “[As a child] I was almost mute, very socially anxious. I couldn’t sit down and eat a meal. My mum had to leave food around the house and I’d have to snack around. Now I know it was neurodivergence. I got diagnosed a few years ago with ADHD with autistic traits. But then it’s been advised that I should go for an autism assessment. They think that maybe it’s autism that’s leading the charge, and the ADHD is almost a by-product of the masking.”

Life at 31: “Something’s happened to me, being 31. I’ve always said I feel like a bit of a passenger in life: things have happened to me, it’s just weird coincidences. Playing Chelsea has helped me work this out. This notion that it’s fate is magical, but it can also feel like it’s all just been written for you.”

[From The Times]

Since I’m still obsessed with figuring out what happened between Aimee and Walton, I’m going to take a swing and say that Walton treated her with more care when he realized she was neurodivergent, and that care ensured that they significantly bonded throughout the filming of The White Lotus. It’s also true that it feels like TWL’s cast always goes a bit bonkers during filming, although the Thailand season was probably a lot more crazy-making, just because people felt especially cut off from their lives back home. Anyway, Aimee is darling and I hope she gets some great projects post-TWL.

Photos courtesy of Fabio Lovino/HBO/Avalon and Avalon Red.