During Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood’s lengthy interview published in Variety this week, “The White Lotus” co-stars didn’t just go to great lengths to dispel rumors that they feuded off-screen while playing star-crossed lovers on the hit HBO show.
They also revealed that they worked together very closely on filming an “intimate sex scene” involving their two characters, Rick and Chelsea, for the season’s final episode. But the actors were disappointed to discover, while watching the episode when it aired, that the scene had been cut.
The third season of “The White Lotus” involved intrigue among several groups of guests at a luxury Thai resort. Goggins played the mysterious Rick, a man with a shady past. Meanwhile, Wood starred as Rick’s free-spirited girlfriend Chelsea. Rick and Chelsea share “a complicated” love story, as Variety explained, because he’s obsessed with tracking down a man in Thailand who he believes killed his father. Chelsea, who sees her and Rick as “soul mates,” keeps trying to pull him back from his dark spiral. It does not end well.
Goggins and Wood told Variety that they immediately connected as co-stars, within a couple minutes of first meeting for lunch before the production started.
“The minute she walked around the corner, I felt, ‘This is gonna work,’” Goggins said. “Two minutes into the conversation, it felt like I’ve known this person for 100 years.”
From left: Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood in Season 3 of “The White Lotus.” (Fabio Lovino/HBO)
Together, they worked on creating the arc of their characters’ love story, which included two sex scenes. “We designed the whole journey, even down to the fact that Chelsea gets on Rick in the first (love) scene,” Wood said. “Then in the last episode, it was Rick picking Chelsea up. It was so, so delicate.”
In the final episode, Rick and Chelsea have an emotional reunion on the beach, then go to their hotel suite to discuss their relationship. Wood told Variety it had a “similar feel” to the “that’s the plan” scene at at earlier breakfast, when they confirmed their love for each other.
This moment in the hotel suite also involved that very “intimate” sex scene, which Goggins said showed “two people who were free. It was this very long, suspended moment of these two people looking at each other. It was so powerful.”
After describing the scene, Variety writer Emily Longeretta said that Goggins picked up her recorder and yelled a message to Mike White, the creator of “The White Lotus.” Goggins said: “(Expletive) you, Mike! We want a director’s cut!”
Elsewhere in the interview, Goggins and Wood pointedly denied the rumor that they feuded. The rumor was in part fueled by co-star Jason Isaacs hinting to The Guardian that there had been on-set drama with “alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.”
Goggins and Wood told Variety there was no drama between them.
“There is no feud,” Goggins said. “I adore, I love this woman madly, and she is so important to me. This is Goldie Hawn. This is Meg Ryan. She can do anything, and she will. You watch what the next 20 years of her experience will be.”
Fans of “The White Lotus” also speculated that there had been a rift between the actors because they briefly unfollowed each other on Instagram after the season finale aired. They have since refollowed each other, according to People.
Wood lamented people’s obsession with celebrities following and unfollowing one another on social media as “irrelevant,” though indicative of “where we’re at culturally.” Goggins, meanwhile, got emotional while trying to explain that unfollowing Wood after the show wrapped was his way of processing the experience.
“I knew what we had gone through, and I knew how close that we had gotten, and I needed to begin to process saying goodbye to Rick and Chelsea,” Goggins said