“I didn’t want to be an actor when I was younger,” says Aimee Lou Wood. “I wanted to be a writer, like Emily Brontë.”
Wood grew up just outside of Manchester, England, in the town of Stockport, where she took her first acting class while still in elementary school. It was at her mother’s suggestion—an effort to help her daughter overcome extreme shyness. “When I did funny characters and funny voices,” she says, “it gave me a protective shield.”
Speaking to me about her childhood, Wood, now 30, exudes the same enthusiasm and unguardedness that defined her breakout role: Aimee Gibbs, in the British series Sex Education, starring Gillian Anderson and Asa Butterfield. Her blond hair and curtain bangs, reminiscent of Georgia May Jagger’s, frame her frequent smiles, which reveal her gapped teeth. “Ooooooh! Yes!” she exclaims in her Mancunian accent when I ask her to share details about her childhood.
Tomorrow, she makes her debut as Chelsea in the third season of Mike White’s hit show The White Lotus, acting alongside Parker Posey, Michelle Monaghan, and Blackpink’s Lisa.
“It’s still not really sunk in that I have actually done it,” says Wood. “I can feel a bit like a passenger in life sometimes.”
The innocent Wood, who attended middle-school drama-club meetings and performed in school plays, never imagined her passion could become a viable career. “That’s not a life,” she recalls thinking. “That doesn’t happen to people.”
Then, in high school, those around her saw something she hadn’t: “Moms at school would be like, ‘Aimee, you should go and be an actor,’” she says. Encouraged by her community, “I just kind of went for it.”
Wood graduated from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2017, having already performed in professional productions such as Robert Icke’s Mary Stuart and the National Theatre’s touring production of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things.
Two years later, she booked Sex Education, about two high-school students who start an underground sex-therapy clinic. Wood played a sweet, seemingly naïve aspiring baker whose story line turned sideways when she was sexually assaulted on a bus. Her performance—one of resilience and empowerment—earned her the EE Rising Star Award at the 2023 BAFTAs after four seasons on the show.
Wood landed her first film role in 2022, acting opposite Bill Nighy in Living—a British adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru.Two years later, she starred in Daddy Issues, playing a 24-year-old who moves back home with her well-meaning but hapless father, played by David Morrissey, after getting pregnant from a one-night stand.
Throughout it all, she made sure to remain tethered to the stage. “Actors need theater,” she says, recalling advice she learned from Closer actor Clive Owen: screen actors risk redeveloping stage fright if they stay away too long, warned Owen. Wood played Sonya in a 2020 West End production of Uncle Vanya before landing her dream role, in 2023, as Sally Bowles in the Kit Kat Club revival of Cabaret.
Now, with The White Lotus, she’s taking on her largest role yet. After chapters in Hawaii and Italy, the black comedy has set its third season in Thailand, where a new ensemble descends on a luxury resort. Once again, a murder takes place in paradise.
Wood plays Chelsea, an astrology-loving free spirit who accompanies her older, irritable, and wealthy boyfriend, Rick, played by Walton Goggins. Initially intimidated by the show’s prestige, she found an anchor in Chelsea, who remains an unaffected outsider to the world of wealth and fame. She “doesn’t [even] know what the White Lotus resort is,” says Wood, explaining that the character helped her stay grounded on set.
The similarities between several of Wood’s roles is no accident. “I love playing women who are underestimated, because I think we are all the time,” she says, tracing a line from Aimee to Sally to Chelsea. “It’s seen as a lack of intelligence to be warm and optimistic, which simply isn’t true.”
The year is just getting started for Wood, who co-stars in Netflix’s upcoming drama Toxic Town, about the U.K.’s Corby toxic-waste scandal. She’ll also be making her screenwriting debut with the BBC rom-com Film Club.
Now, once again, writing has become Wood’s priority. “I don’t really have any dream roles,” she says. “I just want to write.”
Perhaps she’ll be the next Emily Brontë, after all.
Season Three of The White Lotus premieres tomorrow on Max
Jeanne Malle is an Associate Editor at Air Mail
