How White Lotus Helped a Sex Education Star Break Through Body Dysmorphia
On The White Lotus Season 3 set, Sex Education star Aimee Lou Wood confronted a resurgence of body dysmorphia—and turned a nerve-racking bikini scene into the breakthrough that helped her reclaim her confidence.
File this under: actors using their day job to wrestle with real-life stuff. Aimee Lou Wood says a bikini scene in The White Lotus season 3 yanked her old body image issues back to the surface, and she had to think her way through it on set.
What happened on White Lotus
Wood has been honest for years about struggling with body dysmorphia, and she has always treated acting like a safe zone to work through that. But while shooting season 3 in Thailand for months, one swimsuit scene messed with her head. She talked about it in a new Harper's Bazaar interview: the nerves hit, the old brain gremlins showed up, and then she leaned on the character to get out of it.
"I shook myself out of it by thinking, 'It is not about whether Aimee wants to show her body or not - Chelsea does.'"
That is the role she plays this season, Chelsea. Wood said the work got so immersive the line between her and the character started to blur, which in this case helped her borrow Chelsea's confidence and keep going.
The bigger picture
The season pulled strong reviews, and Wood was singled out for praise too. It is one of those neat behind-the-scenes details where the performance fans are responding to came out of a very real on-set wobble, turned into fuel.
What she has coming up
- Anxious People
- The Idiots