Note: This story contains spoilers from “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 8.
“The White Lotus” Season 3 concluded with the heartbreaking death of Aimee Lou Wood’s fan-favorite Chelsea, a decision Wood said even creator Mike White had doubts about.
“Mike expressed doubt about it a lot,” Wood told TheWrap in a Monday interview. “He would come to me … while we were filming, before we’d done the death, [and say] ‘am I making the right decision? I don’t believe I’m making the right decision. Are people going to hate me too much? Is this too far? You have to kill your darlings, as a writer … but is this too far?’”
During those moments of doubt, Wood recalled telling White “it’s right that Chelsea die,” saying, “obviously, I want to f–king be in Season 4 … but she has to [die] — it has to be her.”
With the cast not having seen the finale until Sunday night, Wood said she “wouldn’t put it past Mike to actually film another ending,” pointing to the “fake ending” on the call-sheet for day they filmed the finale shootout. (Wood revealed Patrick Schwarzenegger wanted Saxon to take the bullet for Chelsea and die instead.)
While most “White Lotus” cast members found out the fatal end to the Thailand-set season when they read the finale script, Wood said she put the pieces together of her character’s impending demise during her callback, during which she read the finale scene when Chelsea and Walton Goggins’ Rick agree to be together forever.
“I got really emotional doing that scene … I knew why that scene was there,” Wood said. “Even though I didn’t have context — I just had the scene — I just knew.”
Though White noted he should not be revealing major plot points during the audition process, he confirmed Wood’s intuition was correct, saying “it’s because she has a tragic end,” according to Wood. “He didn’t tell me the full details,” Wood said. “I remember coming off of that thinking Mike just told me a lot, so I’ve got a quite good feeling that I might have got that part, but I won’t get over excited. But we had a real moment on the call — it was a really magical moment.”
In the finale, Wood gets caught in the cross fire between Rick and the resort’s security guards after Rick fatally shoots the owner of the White Lotus, whom he believed to have murdered his father, but actually was his father. Despite Rick telling Chelsea to clear out of the area before making his move, he looks back in the middle of the shootout and notices Chelsea has been fatally shot.
While Wood called Chelsea’s death “unceremonious” — likening it to Hank’s demise in “Breaking Bad,” which made Wood so angry she was “screaming” after seeing it — she noted the sequence summed up this season’s arc beautifully.
“Rick’s there shooting and he doesn’t notice what’s happening behind him until it’s too late, and that’s what’s happened his whole life,” Wood said. “He’s looking out and he’s looking towards the pain and the anger and the revenge, and he’s not looking back at the love.”
With Rick dying just moments later after Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) shoots him in the back while he’s carrying Chelsea’s dead body, Wood calls their deaths “tragic” and “the most painful, beautiful ending.”
To Wood, she and Rick felt like the “sacrificial lambs” that had to die in order for the rest of the guests to get their better ending, pointing to the ending montage that sees the body bags being sent onto a plane while both the trio (Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb) and the Ratliff family (Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola) stand at united fronts, and Sam Rothwell’s Frank dives into a yoga practice.
“Everyone’s got their life back on a more profound level, apart from them, because they’re dead,” Wood said. “It’s a weird feeling because we were the ones that got taken by the death drive, and everyone else gets more of a life force.”
Even Saxon leaves Thailand with a new outlook on life, thanks to Chelsea, as he’s seen with the book she gave him at the end of the finale. “I think that he will internalize and integrate some of the things that she taught him, so in a way … Chelsea is living on, in him, and in all the people that she’s touched,” Wood said.
After guarding the secret of Chelsea’s death since that callback, it’s been a whirlwind of emotion for Wood, who joked that she feels like she’s been on “magic mushrooms” as she bids farewell to her character.
“Leaving last night was like, ‘okay, Aimee, all the parts of you that are in Chelsea that might have not been serving you, you have permission to release now, because she’s gone, and the bits that you want to bring with you from her you can live on with,’” Wood said. “I’m sure that Walton had the same thing — It’s like very profound. And of course it is because it’s Mike, and it’s very intimate and it’s very vulnerable — It’s Mike expressing himself through us, through the character. So all of us are in this web of … meta weirdness.”
Because there’s “so much” of Wood in her portrayal of Chelsea, Wood noted Chelsea’s on-screen demise “felt like the death of parts of me.”
While Chelsea’s journey ends with this tragic turn, her own life feels like more of a “privilege” after the project, saying “it doesn’t feel as scary that this idea of stepping into adulthood and responsibility.”
“It makes you go, ‘I’m not wasting a freaking day,’” Wood said. “It does make you go into that territory of, ‘what do you want in this life?’ And go for it with the same level of tenacity that Chelsea does.”
“The White Lotus” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Max.
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