Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood’s emotions simmer just below the surface. And it’s exactly this quality that makes her such a luminous actor. She opens up about bullying, bodies and playing Cabaret’s Sally Bowles
‘Be here, Aimee!’ Aimee Lou Wood said to herself, “Soak it in!” She was sitting with her hero Bill Nighy late last year, eating penne all’arrabbiata, and she was trying, really trying to be in the moment. She’d just won a Bafta, she was nearing the end of a life-changing project, acting in her first lead film role opposite Nighy in the Oscar-nominated Living, and her career was exploding, and she was 28, and she should have been high-fiving everybody she met, alive with gratitude and appreciation and champagne. But Nighy knew her by then, and knew what she was like. “And Bill said, ‘Don’t go into the hostile parallel world.’”
This, she explains, is where all your trauma is stored, and when you’re there – when she’s there – she reacts in ways that have helped her survive in the past, like, dissociating. “And I’m trying! But the present can be scary. I’m a wrecking ball of feeling.” She says all this – how she is training herself now to breathe, to “be present” – with the same grinning brightness one might expect from a person explaining what they had for tea, and I realise with a thrill that this is how our meeting will go. It’s this openness, in part, that makes her so luminous on screen, this grand vulnerability. And today she will dive straight into the dark meat of a conversation, our only small talk being her insistence that I read German spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle and calculate my astrological Saturn return.
