Why Aimee Lou Wood was the breakout star

Spoiler alert: This review contains spoilers for the season 3 final of “The White Lotus”, which is now streaming at Max.

“Don’t worry anymore about the love you didn’t get,” Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) told her partner Rick (Walton Goggins), together in one of their last moments in the newly closed season of “The White Lotus.” She continued: “Think of the love you have. I love you. I’m here.”

This was an attempt to pull Rick back from the edge; Rick consumed with his own anger and reminded himself again of his difficult childhood and went to a place where Chelsea could sometimes find and restore him. And it was an objective for a sometimes wobbly season of television that mainly held the landing: in this iteration of “The White Lotus” we sometimes no longer had to worry about what we did not provide. Because the clear places, such as the glowing performance of Wood, were there. For everything that can be counted by this season of ‘The White Lotus’, it is not just a new TV star in Wood; It broke her charisma in the plot of the show, so that her ultimate absence echoed.

Wood, formerly a striking on Netflix’s ‘Sex Education’, could not help, but jump from her first performance at ‘The White Lotus’, but her work in the early episodes of the season sometimes felt confusing. Why was this young woman – smart, effortlessly funny, with a dusk sense of humor and a gift to talk to almost someone – spend time with the downbeat and depressive Rick? Wood has a face that is apparently designed to catch the focus of the camera, or that of a colleague hotel guest in the bar; With big eyes and with sweet distinguishing front teeth, so that she not only makes an emotional expression but an event, she is a discovery for the show and, one feels, for just about every potential partner, but the one who ignores her.

But – until she met her destiny in the last sea of ​​fire of the season – Chelsea should not be pity. This was the path she had chosen and in a well -calibrated act with goggins, Wood made it clear that the history of this couple transcended a really bad week. Rick was busy with his plans to take revenge on the man he believed he had killed his father; Before that, the idea fell that the couple had experienced many good times on Chelsea to relieve, and she did this with a nostalgia that made it clear that she was at Rick for reasons outside of blind loyalty. In the penultimate episode of the season, she described their combination as “yin and yang”: her ruthless optimism tempered his downbeat energy, but his world-hugness led her the ballast of life experience. Those who may think of this relationship as purely transactional in an era in which viewers police ‘age holes’ and power dynamics were given the scary version in the characters of Charlotte Le Bon and Jon Gries, worldwide bon Vivants who looked little about each other that goes beyond the next party.

Wood’s description of the “Yin and Yang Battle” – one in which she accurately provided that one of the prospects of the two, hope or pain, would “eventually win” – seemed as if they were first discovered. Like many of the best characters on ‘The White Lotus’, Chelsea is simultaneously complicated and deeply subdued, and he only investigates the details of her life as Mike White’s web of plots closes her. But the way in which the awareness urged her was not sad or disastrous – it was just a fact of life, one that she could tolerate with good humor. After all, she was the hopeful half of this romantic comparison.

“The White Lotus” is usually better at forging stars than to use them. When I think of striking run of the show, his examples that come to mind, artists who were effectively unknown-Alexandra Daddario, Meghann Fahy, Adam Dimarco-or comedy character actors who had not yet delivered large, 360-degree performance. (During the first two seasons, that is Jennifer Coolidge; This time it was Leslie Bibb.) And in this tradition it is wood that is the discovery of this season, a performer whose care and understanding of the deeply kept self -confidence of her character made a complicated relationship legible and was ended in a tragedy.

I have seen criticism of the format of the show, in three seasons, as restricting – as if the device of a death at the start of the procedure and then approached his course in the course of a week of vacation. If there is a murder to be the hook for every season, I think that Chelsea’s could be about as useful as this season could have been generated, partly because of the surprise element. It is shocking at a plot level that the battle between happiness and pain has been so decided and shocking at a certain level beyond Intellect that a character seemed so lively alive Is the one who left. So many guests, this season and earlier, spend their time at locations of the White Lotus hotel chain in Zonked-Out Catatonia. (And this is well played across the board-de three female friends of the series, for example, a large part of the season brought comfortable and safe through in Waaie who kept them safe and secluded from each other.) Chelsea, hesitant to spend too much time investigating her relationship, but enthusiastic for Rick to come back to her, is precisely the opposite.

Perhaps that is a way in which the season approached his alleged theme of spirituality, a that-as I wrote, and then lost in the sexes of sex and money that the series has defined during his run. Chelsea had a deep belief in Rick, even in moments when their path seemed forward; She wanted to be part of something bigger than just herself; She didn’t like to investigate why she felt that way, but when the deepest connection she could. Wood, who shaked away the humiliations of Chelsea that is ignored or mistreated, returned to the relationship again not only submissively to Rick, but understood that they might be able to bring him to a kind of grace. And as illuminated by a striking version of a really exciting new star, this all looks a bit like faith.