She is the Sex Education star now stealing the show in Mike White’s hit series and about to appear in a gritty new Netflix drama. It’s all she ever wanted – but somehow, this ‘sad and shy’ actor finds folding the washing more rewarding than fame
Aimee Lou Wood has a peculiar habit of losing herself. She is known among her fellow cast members for capsizing so completely into a role that they can’t tell who they’re talking to: Wood or her character. (This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that her standout debut role in Sex Education was also called Aimee.) Suranne Jones, who plays alongside her in forthcoming dramedy Film Club, even bought her a bag with a big A on it: “And she said to me,” Wood says, “‘You can put things in there, and that’s Aimee’s bag, so you don’t lose who you are.’ My imagination and my reality can get scarily blurred.”
Wood has been searching for more clarity recently. “I’ve noticed more and more that I’m thinking: what do I actually want? Where can I be the driver and not the passenger?” I meet the 30-year-old in a kind of yoga-adjacent cafe in London. She’s got a Shelley Duvall thing going on, where you can’t tell whether her face – wide open eyes like a Disney fawn, tentative smile – is what makes her seem honest yet mysterious, or whether those qualities created her face. Either way, she looks both very film star, in leather blazer, Dr Martens and miniskirt, yet also not out of place in this hippyish restaurant.
