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The Action-Packed ‘White Lotus’ Finale Proved Aimee Lou Wood Is Its Breakout Star
Aimee Lou Wood's performance as Chelsea broke hearts — and proved the 'White Lotus' tradition of minting a new star each season
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SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “The White Lotus,” now streaming on Max.
“Stop worrying about the love you didn’t get,” Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) told her partner Rick (Walton Goggins), in one of their final moments together on the just-concluded season of “The White Lotus.” She went on: “Think about the love you have. I love you. I’m right here.”
This was an attempt to pull Rick back from the brink; consumed by his own rage at once again recalling his difficult childhood, Rick went to a place where, sometimes, Chelsea could find and recover him. And it was a statement of purpose for a sometimes-wobbly season of television that mainly stuck the landing: In this iteration of “The White Lotus,” we had to sometimes stop worrying about what we weren’t provided. Because the bright spots, like Wood’s incandescent performance, were right there. For all that can be counted against this season of “The White Lotus,” it didn’t merely mint a new TV star in Wood; it knit her charisma into the very plot of the show, so that her ultimate absence resounded.
Wood, previously a standout on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” couldn’t help but pop off the screen from her first appearance on “The White Lotus,” but her work in the season’s early episodes felt at times confounding. Why was this young woman — bright, effortlessly funny, with an askew sense of humor and a gift for talking to just about anyone — spending time with the downbeat and depressive Rick? Wood has a face seemingly designed to catch the camera’s focus, or that of a fellow hotel guest down the bar; wide-eyed and with sweetly distinctive front teeth making her smile not merely an emotional expression but an event, she’s a discovery for the show and, one senses, for just about any potential partner but the one ignoring her.
Popular on VarietyBut — up until she met her fate in the season’s final conflagration — Chelsea was not to be pitied. This was the path she had chosen and, in a well-calibrated acting duet with Goggins, Wood made clear that this couple’s history transcended one really bad week. Rick was preoccupied by his plans to claim revenge on the man he believed had killed his father; prior to that, though, the notion that the couple had experienced loads of good times fell on Chelsea to illuminate, and she did so with a wistfulness that made clear that she was with Rick for reasons beyond blind loyalty. In the season’s penultimate episode, she described their pairing as “yin and yang”: Her relentless optimism tempered his downbeat energy, but his world-weariness lent her the ballast of life experience. Those who might think of this relationship as purely transactional in an age where viewers police “age gaps” and power dynamics got the creepy version in Charlotte Le Bon and Jon Gries’ characters, global bon vivants seeking little from one another beyond accompaniment to the next party.
Wood’s description of the “yin and yang battle” — one in which she accurately foresaw that one of the two’s outlooks, hope or pain, would “eventually win” — came across as if uncovered for the first time. Like many of the best characters on “The White Lotus,” Chelsea is at once complicated and deeply undertherapized, examining the specifics of her life only as Mike White’s web of plotting closes in on her. But the way the realization dawned on her wasn’t sorrowful or baleful — it was just a fact of life, one that she could bear with good humor. She was the hopeful half of this romantic equation, after all.
“The White Lotus” tends to be better at forging stars than at leveraging them. When I think of standouts over the show’s three-season run, examples that come to mind are performers who were effectively unknown to me — Alexandra Daddario, Meghann Fahy, Adam DiMarco — or comedy character actors who hadn’t yet gotten to deliver a major, 360-degree performance. (For the first two seasons, that’s Jennifer Coolidge; this time around, it was Leslie Bibb.) And in this tradition, it’s Wood who is this season’s discovery, a performer whose care and understanding of her character’s deeply held self-belief made a complicated relationship legible, and made its ending into a tragedy.
I’ve seen critiques of the show’s format, three seasons in, as limiting — as if the device of a death shown at the beginning of the proceedings, then approached over the course of a week’s vacation, has run its course. If a killing is to be the hook for each season, then I think that Chelsea’s represents about as meaningful as this season could have generated, in part because of the element of surprise. It is shocking on a plot level that the battle between happiness and agony has been so decisively won, and shocking on some level beyond intellect that a character who seemed so vibrantly alive is the one who left. So many guests, this season and before, spend their time at locations of the White Lotus hotel chain in zonked-out catatonia. (And this is played well across the board — the series’ three middle-aged female friends, for instance, spent much of the season comfortable and secure in delusions that kept them safe and remote from one another themselves.) Chelsea, hesitant to spend too much time examining her relationship but eager for Rick to come back to her so that she can live it, is just the opposite.
Perhaps that’s a way the season approached its putative theme of spirituality, one that — as I’ve written — got lost at times in the sex-and-money swirl that has defined the series throughout its run. Chelsea had deep belief in Rick, even in moments when their path forward seemed occluded; she wanted to be a part of something bigger than just herself; she found pleasure not in examining why she felt this way but in pursuing the deepest connection she could. Wood, shaking off the indignities of Chelsea’s being ignored or maltreated, returned to the relationship anew not merely subservient to Rick but understanding that she might, maybe, be able to bring him toward a kind of grace. And as illuminated by a standout performance by a genuinely exciting new star, all of this looks a bit like faith.
