Aimee Lou Wood of The White Lotus Is So Much More Than Her Smile

in , Aimee Lou Wood began to experience an unsettling sensation.
She became so utterly engrossed in her character, the mystical eternal optimist Chelsea, that she found the line blurring between herself and the woman she was playing.So she left the set for a completely inconvenient five-day trip back to London.“I got into my flat, and I was like, Oh, that’s who I am,” she tells me.

“I was piecing my life back together.”Wood’s nearly spiritual connection to her character, who has quickly become a fan favorite, is evident from her magnetic presence both on screen and in real life.
The actor, age 31, is the first to admit that she shares key traits with Chelsea, including a keen interest in astrology (Chelsea’s an Aries; Wood is an Aquarius with a Scorpio moon).

But it was actually seeing some of Chelsea’s faults, especially her blind devotion to her much older and grumpier boyfriend Rick, that became, for Wood, the most confronting on a personal level.“People will be like, ‘Chelsea’s the best.
Chelsea’s amazing,’” she says.

“And I’m like, ‘I think she is, but she’s also a fucking nightmare.’ At points when I was playing her, I was like, ‘She’s pissing me off now.’ And I had to be like, ‘Why is she pissing me off so much?’ It was because I felt I was seeing myself….
She doesn’t want to pause and be present because she doesn’t want her feelings to come up because they’re scary and they’re hard.

So she’s constantly running away from her feelings and making it all about Rick’s feelings.”Discussing the intricacies of Chelsea’s character is where Wood comes alive.
We talked for nearly an hour about the astrological energy on set (heavily Scorpio), her relationships with her costars (Patrick Schwarzenegger, she says, was the most