The energy around Aimee Lou Wood feels different. People really loved her “delulu” character in The White Lotus’s third season, and they love Aimee’s sweet, low-key British-ness. It’s clear that many actors from the third season were changed by the experience, Aimee most of all. In any case, she’s now a huge star and close to being a household name. It doesn’t look like she’s grasping the opportunities with both hands though – she seems to have mixed feelings about her newfound fame. She covers the latest issue of GQ Hype and talks about all of it… all of it except for whatever happened with Walton Goggins. Some highlights:

Her perspective really skewed as they filmed TWL: “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.”

Her sanity deteriorated: “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.” Two weeks before filming the finale—in which Chelsea catches a stray bullet during a shootout and dies in Rick’s arms—Wood started waking up with an ominous feeling of doom hanging over her. The sadness showed up in her body in strange ways too. She texted friends back home worrying that she looked older and was finding grey hairs. “I was obsessed with Amy Winehouse and Brittany Murphy, all these women I love and admire who died too young. I look at them and see what they could have done. And they didn’t get to do it.”

She loves that people analyzed the crap out of TWL: “Media literacy is back! People are talking about the symbolism! Oh my god, I love that. I love being wanky, I love being like, ‘oh, the metaphor of that. It’s so fun seeing people do a whole bloody paragraph about an item of clothing that was accidentally put on me, but the meaning they’ve put on it is so clever. If we had done that, that would have been really clever—but we simply did not.”

On her teeth: “It makes me really happy that it’s symbolizing rebellion and freedom, but there’s a limit. The whole conversation is just about my teeth, and it makes me a bit sad because I’m not getting to talk about my work. They think it’s nice because they’re not criticizing.” She pauses for a moment, “And, I have to go there… I don’t know if it was a man would we be talking about it this much? It’s still going on about a woman’s appearance.”

Rick & Chelsea’s death scene in the water: The scene was filmed in a water tank and it took a while for Wood and Goggins to get the perfect shot. “We had to fall down together and you see us rising up, all of that took a long time,” she says. “I kept flipping and we’d have to cut and start again. We were in there the whole day. I had to hold my breath for a bloody long time.”

Whether Rick & Chelsea were fated to be together: “I think it’s really confronting for some because there’s a lot of people that have been Chelsea and it’s painful when you love someone and they’re not giving you anything back. It f–king hurts. It’s only after you leave that relationship that you go ‘what the f–k was I doing for so long, how did I do that?’’

How she feels about her career: Surrounded by confident Americans, she felt as though until then she hadn’t been taking her career seriously enough, but when she got home, she realized she actually didn’t care. “I want to have a weekend. I want to be with my friends. I don’t want to not be thinking about f–king progressing my career for one second, because I don’t even f–king care about progressing my career. So why is all my energy going towards something I don’t care about?”

What she really wants: “I think this is why I get really obsessed with having a baby, because if I have a baby, everyone will leave me the f–k alone! And I can’t have a baby for that reason. I’ve always wanted a cosy house and a baby and a fire. I just want that. That’s the dream.”

[From GQ Hype]

What I keep coming back to is the difference between American actors and British actors. Americans are very ambitious and they’re planning out their careers and looking to leverage a huge moment like “getting cast on TWL.” I imagine many of those American actors were telling Aimee, “you’re going to be huge after this, you need to start booking jobs right away, do you have a publicist” etc. And she went home and was like… yeah, I don’t actually want any of that. I want to still be able to go to the pub and have time off and not live and breathe my work 24-7. Fair enough!

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Avalon/HBO and GQ.