Aimee Lou Wood on audition horror stories and the magic of Amanda Bynes

Aimee Lou Wood is a changed woman. It’s all thanks to her latest film Living, which marks a pretty swift change of pace for the Sex Education star. A British adaptation of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s beloved drama Ikiru (1952), it follows Bill Nighy’s Mr. Williams, a jaded civil servant who finds a new lease of life following a cancer diagnosis. 27-year-old Wood plays his happy-go-lucky colleague, Margaret, who, as she says, is essentially ​“the character of life in Living”.

There were a lot of factors that made this project shift Wood’s perspective – including its incredible cast and source material, obviously – but she learned the most about herself while trying to get into the shoes of her character. ​“I am such an over-thinker. I can analyse myself into doing nothing,” she explains over Zoom. ​“What I love about Margaret is that she’s got a great, impressive job, but she’d rather go and do a less respectable job because she thinks there’s a chance she might be happier doing that. She’s honest, she doesn’t let resentment grow, and she’s not a people pleaser. I think it was really helpful playing a part like that because [I realised that] you can be kind while also being assertive and wanting stuff for yourself.”

Those life lessons would probably benefit Wood’s character in Sex Education, too. Having burst onto our screens as ex-popular kid Aimee three years ago, Wood’s character has grappled with boy troubles, self-esteem issues and even sexual assault over the show’s three seasons. As the nation waits with bated breath for the arrival of a fourth, are there any insider secrets Wood can share with us about what’s in store? Well, it turns out that on-screen Aimee is on a similar path of self discovery as off-screen Aimee.

“Everyone’s at a new school, her best friend Maeve is in America and she broke up with Steve, so she’s very much by herself for the first time ever. She’s in a very new place emotionally, because she doesn’t have any of her comfort blankets around,” says Wood. ​“But it’s also quite exciting because she’s really figuring out who she is, what her point of view is and what she wants to express, and that’s when she hits on art and starts an art A‑Level. This season is very much about her realising that she is not stupid.”

Lovely, right? Alas, there’s no release date for series four of Sex Education yet, but while you wait, you can head to Southbank Centre in London to watch Wood’s turn in Living as part of the BFI’s London Film Festival, before it hits cinemas nationwide on 4^th November. For now, though, it’s time to dig deep into Aimee Lou Wood’s own journey to stardom, from local drama production fame to awkward audition moments.

The TV show that made me want to get into acting is…

My mum would always show me ​‘80s movies, like John Hughes and all that kind of stuff, and my dad would show me Oscar-winning classics. But if I’m really honest, I’d love to say it was something really mature and grown up, but when I was about eight and watching Amanda Bynes doing all these different sketches on The Amanda Show, I was like, ​“God, that looks good!” It was things like that – That’s So Raven, etc. There was also Smack the Pony, which was a group of women who did different sketches. The first thing that made me think I could do it was comedy and funny women like that.

When I signed up to my local drama club…

I was very shy. I would always do characters for my mum, and I wrote plays and made my friends act in them, but I would never act [myself]. In year five, my favourite teacher, Mrs Robertson, set up a drama club and I was like, ​“Maybe I should do that.”

The first time I performed on stage was…

My first proper role was Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls, in secondary school when I was 16. I felt famous. I was always a bit weird at school and then people were saying to my mum, ​“she should go and do acting!” It was quite exciting. Before that, I went to a place called Brookdale Youth Theatre to help me with my confidence. We did Annie and everyone had to audition. I was about 10 and I had been working on Tomorrow for weeks. I knew I had nailed this song. My mum was like, ​“If you can get up and do it, you will be Annie in this play.” And I couldn’t do it. I froze. It wasn’t until secondary school that I actually had the guts to audition for a part again, and that was Adelaide.

My most embarrassing audition moment was…

I’ve had some absolute shockers. I met a director that I really, really admired for a chat and I loved him so much that I just burst into tears. I could not answer any of his questions because I was crying so much. He’d be like, ​“So, any brothers and sisters?” and I’d just burst into tears. I’m a very emotional person. That one was probably the most embarrassing because I admired him so much, even though I’ve had worse ones. When anyone is feeling bad about an audition, I’m like, ​“come and chat”. Because honestly, there have been things that you’re like, ​“no, that cannot be true” and I swear on my life it is. I won’t detail, but you can imagine – stomach bugs and things like that. Catastrophic.

The biggest lie I’ve ever told to get a part was…

Years and years ago, I pretended I could BMX. It was before I was even acting properly, when I was auditioning for drama school. I also went to an open audition for a Converse advert or something, and it said, ​“Can you either skateboard or BMX?” I thought, ​“I definitely can’t skateboard, so I’ll say BMX, because it can’t be that different to riding a bike.” It turned out, at the audition, it was people who were genuinely pro, like the people you see on the Southbank. So that was quite bad. They were like, ​“So how long have you been BMXing for?” I couldn’t see the lie through. I was like, ​“I’m sorry, I actually can’t.”

The project that taught me the most about acting is…

I’ve learned [different things] from different people. I learned so much from Ben Taylor, who directed Sex Education, because it was my first screen job. At drama school, we did like one screen lesson – we do theatre, we do plays – so going, learning on the job and being launched into this thing, I learned so much from him and all of my Sex Education castmates. But I also think that with theatre, you get to spend so long playing the part – during Uncle Vanya, where I played Sonya [at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre in 2020], I probably learned as much doing that for a few months as I did at drama school for three years. Actually just doing the same show over and over for three months, every night, sometimes twice a day, there’s a kind of rigorousness to theatre that I think means you can’t help but learn so much about yourself. But also watching Oliver [Chris], Bill [Nighy] and Alex [Sharp] in Living… all of them. I’ve learned huge amounts on every single job.

Living screens on Tuesday 11^th at London Film Festival. Ticket info