In The White Lotus, Aimee Lou Wood is acting like herself

At THE FACE, we’re fans of Aimee Lou Wood. We loved her as the kooky Aimee Gibbs in Sex Education, as a proto manic-pixie-dream-girl opposite Bill Nighy in the 2022 post-War film Living, and as someone who rocks jeans and a nice top better than most.

Mike White was a fan, too, even though he’d seen her in none of the above. But when the creator of The White Lotus was assembling his typically stacked cast for the Thailand-set third season of his HBO anthology series, it turned out the cool, fast-talking actor from Stockport was just who he wanted to play Chelsea. She’s the defiantly perky, much-younger English partner of Rick, a raddled, rude American grump, played by 53-year-old character actor Walton Goggins (last seen as The Ghoul in Fallout).

​“I just auditioned, and they’d seen loads and loads of girls,” says Aimee. Radiating cheerful energy from within the gloomy thicket of camera gear, lighting equipment and barely seen assistants – standard procedure for promotional junkets – the 30-year-old is a bright presence in a crowded central London hotel suite.

It turns out White felt the same about the innately sunny personality of an actor who’s one of only two Brits in this season’s cast (the other is Jason Isaac). In a new series bristling, as per, with more established, mostly American names (Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb), plus a couple of US-based nepo boys (Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola), the showrunner fell for Aimee. “[Apparently] he saw my self-tape and said: ​‘Yeah, that’s Chelsea.’ I think that’s how he does his casting a lot of the time: pure instinct.”

Also instinctive: letting her be herself. ​“I did one [audition] in an American accent and one in my own. They were like: ​‘We love your own accent. Let’s make Chelsea from Manchester.’”

But ​“at one point he was like: ​‘What about Liverpool?’ And I went: ​‘I can do Liverpool, but that really changes my accent.’ And he was like: ​‘Oh no, just speak in your own.’ Mike really likes that closeness between the character and the actor.

It’s all voyeuristic, isn’t it?” she says of a hit series with a killer format: bringing us up-close-and-personal, over seven days of drama, to the comings, goings, snoggings and plottings of guests corralled in luxury resorts, firstly in Hawaii, then Sicily, and now at the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui. As Aimee puts it, The White Lotus has ​“reality TV infused in there, and documentary… So, I think he likes us being as claustrophobically close to the character as possible.”

Welcome to The White Lotus, Aimee! In your first scene, you’re told to stop talking by Rick. Later in the episode he says: ​“You’re like a fucking machine gun, you know that? Enough with the questions.” Chelsea replies by grinning and bearing it, and suggesting they sleep together in the couple’s suite. What does that tell us early on about Chelsea’s personality?

That Chelsea is seemingly very good at taking the water-off-a-duck’s-back approach. I admire her resilience, because it takes a lot of courage to be an optimistic, hopeful person. People are gonna have an idea about Rick. I’ve still got Chelsea goggles on [but] people have been saying: ​“Obviously she’s in quite a problematic, toxic [relationship]…” I’m going: ​“Is she?”

Because I had to not think of it like that at all. I had to play it completely from her point of view, not judge the relationship and be like [swoony voice]: ​“The cosmos brought us together, he is my soulmate.” Because she’s decided that that’s the truth, she’s willing to overlook a lot of behaviours that might not be great. But Rick and Chelsea do go on quite a surprising [journey].

Is Chelsea aware that Parker Posey’s character describes her as ​“some bimbo off the internet”, that people have that view of her?

What I love about her is that she doesn’t mind optics or perception or ego. She’s just all about experience. So I don’t think she gives a shite what people think of her and Rick. She does give a shit about having a good time with him. That’s why she’s so not like any other White Lotus guest. They’re all about who’s judging them. What everyone’s saying about them. How they’re coming across. She’s like: ​“This is my life, and I’m gonna juice it for everything it’s got.“

But she also gets complimented by another guest – a nice one – on her teeth. That must happen to you a lot in real life. How surprised were you to see it in the script?

Do you know what? It wasn’t in the script. Charlotte [Le Bon, playing a model] improvised that, because she was obsessed with my teeth. When she walks in and goes, ​“I love your teeth”, I didn’t know she was gonna say that. Which does happen to me a lot in life. And she said to Mike: ​“Can we have that?” And Mike said: ​“Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, I love that.” But yeah, it was a cute moment that she completely surprised me with.

How much of a White Lotus fan were you before this?

Huge. Huge. I would watch it and be like: ​“I want to be in the show so much – but I can’t see myself in this world at all.” So when [the character of] Chelsea came along, I was like: ​“This is it!” Because she’s so not of this world. It was so exciting when I opened up the audition email and I was like: ​“Oh God, I could actually maybe be in The White Lotus!” If there was going to be a way into that world, Chelsea would be it, with her astrology and her madness.

Will Sharpe, who directed you in The Electrical Life of Lous Wain, and who starred in the last series, told me that ​“the first text Mike sent me was: ​‘Get to the gym, because you’ll have to take your shirt off.’” Any directions like that for you?

Mike did not say anything of the sort to me. The boys were way more [physically challenged]. The boys were the ones that were really in the gym. The girls were way more chilled. We were all like: ​“God, they seem to be quite stressed about how they look.“

Did you ask Will what it was like to work on The White Lotus before you flew out?

I’m going to see him soon, and I am going to ask him all about it. But I emailed him when I was watching season two, being like: ​“You’re so good in White Lotus!” I was so shocked when he turned up. I thought: Maybe there is a chance for me, because Will’s quite odd like me…

But I did speak to Leo Woodall, and he checked in a few times while I was there. He was like: ​“Are you still OK?” Because he knows what the experience is like.

We interviewed him in January last year, just as One Day was dropping. Your casting had just been announced. I asked if he had advice for you: ​“Just have as much fun as you can… Some of the best things happen when you just let it all go and [think]: ​‘I’m just gonna have fucking fun with this.’ Because it’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime gig.”

That was so similar to the advice he gave to me. There was one time he checked in and I was like: ​“I’m not good, Leo! I’M HAVING A CRISIS!” And he got me through it. By the end of it, I was like: ​“I’ve just got to be a bit punk, haven’t I?” He was like: ​“That’s exactly it. You’ve just got to go and be like: ​‘Fuck it.’” Because I was starting to get [too much] in my head. It was such a helpful chat, halfway through, to [realise]: ​“Chelsea doesn’t give a shit how she’s coming across. So Aimee can’t either.”

To be fair, you were there for seven months. How was it shooting for all that time, and staying in the same hotel in which you were filming?

It was exactly like The Truman Show. You’re walking out [of your room] and you’re instantly on set. [They shout:] ​“That’s a wrap, everyone.” Then you walk two steps to your room, and you’re still seeing the crew walk past. There’s just no escape. It really is like being on Big Brother. So it was amazing and exciting. But deeply challenging. And I was ready to go home at the end of the seven months – but also really overwhelmed to go home. When I got back, I found it so hard to adjust to the real world.

How did that way of working impact you and your castmates?

It meant that we made really deep connections, because you absolutely had to, to get through it. We were each other’s world. We had a mini world that Mike was God of, and we were all just in it. It was a complete bubble.

Who’s your new best pal from the cast?

Leslie is the one I speak to nearly every day still, because we were like sisters out there. She’s a Scorpio sun, I’m a Scorpio moon, so that makes sense. And obviously Walton, because all of our stuff was together.

Charlotte, who plays Chloe, because of the schedule, she was able to go home quite a lot. Whereas some of us were there the whole time. Me and Patrick… [that] was also a deep connection. My first scene was with Patrick, and my last scene was with Patrick. We went on a real long old journey together. I said to him: ​“I think you were my dad in a past life.“

Did any of your actual family, or pals, come out and see you?

I had a couple friends. But it was a struggle adjusting to having the outside world coming in… It was hard to hold both of them together. I wish I’d had more [visitors], but I just couldn’t bring myself to organise it. I was just too overwhelmed.

You’ve finally wrapped your BBC comedy series Film Club, in which you also act. That’s 10 years after you and co-writer Ralph Davis met, and five years after you started writing it…

Yeah. When I go, ​“it was a really long time”, writers are like: ​“Yes, that’s how long it takes to get things made.” We started writing it as a bit of fun. It was going to be a play at first. Then we spoke to someone about it, and they were like: ​“You should make it into a TV show.” So we came up with this, and it just worked. But, yeah, it’s really cool. It’s scary, because you’re on set and you’re doing a scene, and you’re listening to it, and you’re thinking: ​“I wish I hadn’t written that…” It’s hard to get out of the writer brain and be an actor.

Do you see your professional future as being a twin-track thing, acting interspersed with writing?

I think so. The dream would be to go more into the writing side. I love acting, but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I was speaking to [White Lotus co-star] Jason’s wife Emma [Hewitt] about it, because she was an actor and then became a writer and a director. People roll their eyes and go: ​“Yeah, yeah, you’re never not going to be an actor.” And she was like: ​“No, you might want to stop. And that is also OK.” I would quite like to move more on the writing side, and [only] do a bit of acting when it’s something that I really want to do.

Before we get to see you in Film Club, you also have Toxic Town on Netflix later this month. You’re playing Tracey Taylor, one of the mums who fought for the truth about an old steelworks in Corby poisoning unborn babies, with dialogue written by Jack Thorne, one of our best playwrights and screenwriters. That must have been a gift, a real story about real people, adapted by someone of his stature.

Yeah. What was amazing was we didn’t meet the real women before – we met them when we finished, because Minkie [Spiro], the director, didn’t want us to be too self-conscious about being like the real women. But when I met her, I went: that’s exactly who I’ve been seeing. Because Jack is such a good writer, that’s exactly who was on the page. When I saw Jack Thorne [was attached], I was like: ​“I’m doing this, no matter what it is.“

You turned 30 last year. How did you celebrate?

In my flat with my friends, and then a few days later, I went to Thailand to do White Lotus. So I had most of my 30^th year in Thailand. Which was weird, because I was so ready to be 30 and be like: ​“I’m decorating my flat! I’m 30!” I think 31 is going to be my nesting time. I want to nest.”

The White Lotus season three is available weekly on Sky and NOW. Crack open the sunscreen.