It says something about the speed and intensity of the global news cycle that Aimee Lou Wood has in the space of ten days become the most talked about celebrity on the planet.
Wood’s performance as Chelsea in black comedy drama The White Lotus won her universal acclaim, with viewers falling for the hippie chick who is eternally and delusionally devoted to her older boyfriend, Rick.
Her disappointed reaction to a taster of wine at dinner – ‘I don’t mean to complain, but that’s not very much’ – was widely celebrated as an instant classic, and her many disappointed faces have launched a staggering number of memes. Twenty million TikTok videos, and counting, reference Wood and her character Chelsea.
Her distinctive teeth became a talking point, and her refreshing open energy – and habit of talking with absolute sincerity about star signs – was a hit on the chat show circuit, too. She opened up about everything from her previous eating disorders to her belief that she is ‘ugly’ and her diagnosis with ADHD.
As one colleague said to me this week, she’s ‘an intense and dramatic person… in a way which is very Millennial’. Not that she’s difficult to deal with, I’m told. She is simply ‘a drama in her own right, a very sensitive person’.
Late on Monday night she was making emotional posts about her reaction to a ‘mean’ sketch on the US comedy show Saturday Night Live, which referred to her teeth during a skit called ‘The White POTUS’ (about politicians living inside a version of The White Lotus show). Wood shared how much she appreciated the support of fans in the face of apparent bullying about her appearance. Earlier that day she had been in tears on the street.
What has really turned the interest in the actress into a phenomenon, though, is the unsolved riddle of just what has passed between her and her co-star Walton Goggins, 53, who plays her older White Lotus boyfriend.
Aimee Lou Wood’s performance as Chelsea in black comedy drama The White Lotus won her universal acclaim
Having appeared very close on set – of which more later – by the time the last episode went out earlier this month they were no longer following each other on social media.
Around the show’s finale, which streamed on April 6, both of them posted dozens of photos, including of them together, on social media.
Goggins’ ‘farewell’ to The White Lotus post ran: ‘To me, ours was a love story. It was only ever a love story, hindered by unresolved, childhood trauma. We all have them… but can we move past them. In the depths of our despair there is always beauty around us. If we can sit with our pain, just sit with it… not react… not be defined by it… It’s there… the love the world is constantly giving in any given moment is there. Always waiting for us to see it… Trust me I know. Thank you Mike White [the writer and director of The White Lotus] for your imagination, your tender heart, for the privilege of giving us the opportunity to tell it. Thank you Aimee Lou for being my partner… a journey I will never forget.’
The soundtrack to this post was the Fleetwood Mac song Silver Springs, written by Stevie Nicks about her tumultuous breakup with band guitarist Lindsey Buckingham.
As soon as he posted it, the internet went wild with completely unsubstantiated theories. Goggins, they ran, was lamenting some kind of complicated ‘situation’ with his much younger co-star, despite the fact he has been married for years to filmmaker Nadia Conners, 55.
Goggins did not comment on the speculation, but – perhaps spooked by the intensity of the online reaction – later changed the music from Silver Springs to John Lennon’s Love.
Meanwhile, Aimee Lou posted a black and white photo of her and Goggins on set, under the caption: ‘The perfect storm.’
Co-star Walton Goggins, who plays her older boyfriend, posted dozens of photos of them together – soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac song Silver Springs
Another post featured graffiti on a garage door reading: ‘I love you R+C forever’ – presumably for Rick + Chelsea – and was set to… Fleetwood Mac’s Silver Springs.
Fuel was added to the gossip swirling around their real-life relationship when Goggins did not attend a cast viewing party along with Wood and the others.
Wood told the Hollywood Reporter on April 7: ‘I was sad that Walton wasn’t there because it was something that we did together, but also it’s so f******g Rick and Chelsea.’ She added: ‘Like, of course Walton had to watch it alone and of course I had to watch it in the group because there is so much Aimee in Chelsea and so much Walton in Rick.’
Rick barely shows any emotion or interest towards Chelsea throughout the series, whereas she is seen as upbeat and free-spirited even in the face of repeated danger.
And the tantalising mystery only deepened when it was noticed that both Wood and Goggins were tagging the rest of the cast in posts, but not tagging each other.
Indeed, by April 10, Goggins appeared to have blocked Wood as her comments on his posts also disappeared.
Then, on Monday, Goggins did something perhaps even stranger. He reacted positively to the SNL White POTUS spoof, with its very specific send-up of Wood’s teeth, writing: ‘Hahahahahhahaha amazzzingggg.’
He also shared the sketch to his Instagram story, describing it as ‘smashing’. Both the comment and story were deleted after a few hours, with some speculating that it was removed after Wood’s feelings were made known. The show has since apologised for the joke.
Wood plays Chelsea, the hippie chick who is eternally and delusionally devoted to her older boyfriend, Rick
Meanwhile there also seems to be some unexplained tension between Goggins’ wife and his co-star Leslie Bibb, who stars as Kate Bohr, one of three central female characters in a rekindled friendship group. Bibb is married to Goggins’ best friend, the actor Sam Rockwell – who also guest starred in the series – and Goggins has called her his sister. The two couples have known each other for 15 years.
However, although Bibb currently follows Goggins and Wood on Instagram, she doesn’t follow Goggins’ wife Nadia Conners. Nor does Goggins’ wife follow Bibb, 51.
In all it seems a painful end to what most of the cast agree was a ‘beautiful’ experience on the show which has become, by the time of its third series, a genuine cultural phenomenon.
Wood, the breakout star of Sex Education and innocence personified in the film Living, was cast by the show’s writer Mike White because she was so perfect for quirky, spiritual Chelsea.
She told an interviewer: ‘Someone told me how much Mike had fought for me. They said: “It had to be you, no matter what HBO said.” It was honestly from the nicest place, but my little head goes: “HBO didn’t want me. And I know why HBO didn’t want me, it’s because I’m ugly. Mike had to say please let me have the ugly girl!” That was the thing that was in my head.’
Of course, what White had wanted was her unique combination of beauty and open-hearted naivete and optimistic energy. He had her keep her distinctive Mancunian accent and told Wood that she had a ‘shared essence’ with Chelsea – basically that the character was her and she was the character.
By contrast, Goggins’ Rick was miserable and cynical, the yin to her yang on screen. But off it they had a lot of fun.
In an interview before the show went out in February, she said: ‘I had fun with everyone when I was filming The White Lotus. However I am a Scorpio Moon and Leslie Bibb and Walton Goggins are Scorpio Suns so we were the Scorpio three.
There also seems to be some unexplained tension between Goggins’ wife, Nadia Conners (pictured) and his co-star Leslie Bibb
‘We have a group [on Whatsapp] called Jackson Browne because we would just sit and listen to Jackson Browne and drink cocktails and eat fries.’
All of the cast have confirmed that there was a party-hard atmosphere after filming as they soaked up the best of what the holiday resorts had to offer – a perk of filming in five-star resorts. Goggins posted pictures of himself and the cast sharing carefree nights dancing and drinking and wrote: ‘We had a F***ing TIME!’. In an interview he complained that the Four Seasons in Koh Samui had charged $150 (£113) for a humble bottle of prosecco.
He said: ‘Six weeks into filming, I go to pay my bill. You’re telling me Thai-spiced cashews cost that much? I thought I had maybe, like, five. And they said, “No, you had 30.”’
Wood concedes that the atmosphere became claustrophobic at times between the cast and crew – a combination of heat, proximity and partying. She said: ‘It was like nothing I’d ever experienced. It did feel like a bit of a social experiment… I had a slow and steady disintegration of my sanity.’
Actor Jason Isaacs, 61, who plays White Lotus resort guest Timothy Ratliff, said of the filming: ‘It’s a kind of crucible, a five-star gilded cage. There’s no question that sometimes it is absolutely fabulous, and sometimes it’s Lord of the Flies.
‘It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp: you couldn’t avoid one other. There are tensions and difficulties, I don’t know if they spilled from on screen to off-screen, or if it would have happened anyway.
‘There were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke. It’s a long period of time for people to be away from their family with an open bar and all the wildness being in Thailand allows.
‘I can’t pretend I wasn’t involved in some off-screen drama. Dave [producer Dave Bernad] has seen it before, twice, and so has Mike [White]. I can’t speak for them, but I imagine they think it feeds into the on-screen drama, and they might well be right.
‘I think the heat contributed to these fissures appearing. We’ll all see one other again [for the premiere] and I’m sure we’ll be hugging and kissing and remembering it fondly. But there were times when things were not quite so fond.
‘I was in some ways used to it, but within a couple of weeks my wife [who was with him on set and used to be an actor] went, “Some of these people are f***ing mad.” I said, “No, it’s just a bunch of actors away on location, love. You’ve forgotten what it’s like.”’
Dave Bernad added: ‘People are away from home and, you know, there’s a lot of bacchanalian behaviour going on. I’m not telling stories out of school. It’s just grownups doing whatever we like. Thailand is a place full of parties, and we are not immune.’
On August 10 last year, while the cast celebrated the end of filming, Goggins posted the following comment on Wood’s Instagram: ‘You are the brightest light in every room. A Human’s Human. Miss you.’
This loving post was completed with two fox emojis – one of a number of times that Goggins referred to his co-star as a fox. Another time he called her ‘a natural born (fox emoji) inside and out’.
When the show had its launch in Los Angeles in February, Wood turned up in a custom maroon burgundy Burberry dress, decorated with pictures of foxes. Possibly just a coincidence rather than a reference to her co-star’s fond characterisation. But it makes the current state of affairs appear all the odder.
It’s not unusual, of course, for intense friendships to blossom on set, only to fall away to nothing once the director has called ‘cut’. Reflecting on the experience, Goggins said: ‘We all were invited to this part… and we partied our asses off. It was a collective experience, an individual experience.. an experience of real growth I believe for us all. Certainly it was for me. I think we all lost our minds willingly or otherwise somewhere along the way. I know I did. It was a wild ride.’
