It’s Aimee Lou Wood’s big year. Sure, she’s already starred in Sex Education, Cabaret, Uncle Vanya and has shared screens with the likes of Bill Nighy, Gillian Anderson, Jodie Whittaker, David Morrissey and Nick Frost. But 2025 is shaping up to be something even bigger.
Look left, she’s relaxing by the pool in Thailand, fussing over a frustrated Walton Goggins in HBO’s primetime darling, The White Lotus. Look right, she’s playing a Corby mum grappling with the loss of her baby due to toxic dust poisoning in Netflix’s Toxic Town, based on the real-life "British Erin Brockovich" story of the 1980s and 1990s.
Described by her White Lotus castmates as an “old soul”, this 30-year-old Stockport girl has gone from rising star to supernova. Here’s everything you need to know about Aimee Lou Wood.
A troubled childhood and private school bullying
Born in 1994 to a car dealer dad and a mum who worked for ChildLine, Wood was raised in Bramhall, a leafy suburb of Stockport in Greater Manchester.
When she was a child, her father struggled with drug and alcohol addiction until her parents eventually split up. “He would go out for a pint and not come back for days,” Wood told Stylist in 2020. “He once went out and didn’t come back for 10 weeks because he’d been to the World Cup in Korea. He was a party animal on the scene in Manchester, so he would hang out with celebrities and Manchester City football players; he had a massive ego, so that gave him validation.”
She recalled this period of her life being “turbulent” when speaking to The Guardian in 2023, but noted that it had its good moments. “I got to live with my nana and grandad for a year, and it was the best time,” Wood told the publication. “And even with my dad, there are moments that were kind of beautiful in what was quite an extreme situation. Like, it was chaos when he was living at his friend’s house, but we’d stay up watching brilliant movies until 4am. All these things that maybe pushed me into negative behaviours, I’m now looking back at with a lot more… softness.”
Wood’s stepfather paid for her to start at a private school, but she was bullied by her other classmates, something she’s reflected on since becoming famous. When Sex Education shot her into stardom in 2019, she messaged one of her school bullies, thanking him for making her into the person she had become. To her surprise, he apologised.
In school, she found solace in drama class, where she could put on a brave (or funny, or charming) face and pretend to be another person. Her passion for drama lead her to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) where she graduated in 2017.
Wood has a sister, Emily, who is a successful make-up artist and Aimee’s sole face painter. She also has two half-siblings from her father, who is now sober and doing well.
Sex Education and struggling with eating disorders
“It’s unreal how quickly my life changed,” she told Harper’s Bazaar of her 2019 casting in Sex Education. “I found it overwhelming. All of a sudden, your face is known, and people don’t see that you’re a person who might be going through their own stuff.”
Wood was taken aback when she landed the role of Aimee, partly due to her teeth (“I just thought, ‘It’s a Netflix show, I’m not going to get on there with my teeth,’” she told Stylist) and partly due to the fact she had auditioned three times for a different part, Lily. “But they ended up calling me back for Aimee, and she just is me,” she recalled in the Stylist interview.
As Wood gained fame for her Sex Education role, she became known for speaking candidly about body dysmorphia and her experience with eating disorders. She admits being impacted by comments made by TV crew members about her body, which triggered bulimic impulses.
“I’d thought it was the comments that were making me have those relapses,” she told The Guardian. “But now I realise it wasn’t the comments — it was because I was laughing them off. I wasn’t telling people to stop talking to me like that. I was saying it later, through the sideways expression of the eating disorder. I wanted to be liked. I wanted them to think I was a legend!”
After four years of playing Aimee, Sex Education finally came to an end in 2023. “There’s always going to be a tie to that show,” Wood recently told Elle. “A hundred percent. I remember the day that they called me and they were like, ‘We’re not doing season 5. That’s it. [After] season 4, it’s over.’ And I felt so free. I was so free because I was ready. I was ready to graduate. And to grow up, actually, because it was weird playing something so much younger than me for so long, and I was just out-ageing her and outgrowing her quite a lot, even though I love her to pieces.”
From playing teens to becoming an on-screen mum
After Sex Education, Wood landed her first feature film starring role opposite Bill Nighy in Living (2022) and took on the mantle of playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret’s return to the West End in 2023. Then came more TV roles, portraying young mum Gemma in Daddy Issues, as well as the on-screen version of Tracey Taylor, the Corby mum who lost her daughter at just four days old due to the impact of toxic steel waste, in Toxic Town.
Wood recently met the real Tracey Taylor for a filmed interview, where Taylor showed Wood a picture of baby Shelby Anne, and Wood immediately started crying. “What you have done for her (Shelby), I am in debt to you because you have done her justice, and you have done us justice, and we will be forever grateful,” Taylor told the actress through her own tears.
Then came another very special script, this time for a younger role: Chelsea, a young, fun guest at The White Lotus in Thailand. “Every other part that I’ve played recently has been a mum,” Wood told Elle. “I was always getting auditions for teenagers and the next minute it was like, ‘She’s a young mum [...] Chelsea was the first part in a while that I’d got through that wasn’t a mum.”
Checking into The White Lotus in Thailand
“I am not the same person as I was pre-White Lotus,” Wood confessed in her interview with Elle. The 30-year-old actress plays Manchester girl Chelsea, who is staying at the notorious fictional hotel chain alongside her mysterious, moody older boyfriend, Rick (played by Walton Goggins). She filmed the series, which is now on its third innings, last year for seven months in Thailand. “It was exactly like The Truman Show,” she told The Face magazine.
“[Mike White] saw my self-tape and said: ‘Yeah, that’s Chelsea.’ I think that’s how he does his casting a lot of the time: pure instinct,” she recalled. “I did one [audition] in an American accent and one in my own. They were like: ‘We love your own accent. Let’s make Chelsea from Manchester.’”
As well as The White Lotus, which is available on NOW TV and Sky every Monday, Wood says she’s currently writing her own TV series. Watch this space.
