The heart and soul of The White Lotus Season 3 is undoubtedly Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), an ethereal Mancunian with offbeat style, hilarious facial expressions, and an undying devotion to her older boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins). While other characters on the HBO hit are drawn by creator/writer/director Mike White as cruel, selfish, or ignorant of their own privilege, Chelsea is the rare White Lotus guest who is sweet, caring, and totally soaking up the luxury experience. She’s exactly who we’d all want to hang out with at the White Lotus pool — and the same could be said of the actress who brings her to life.

Aimee Lou Wood first popped for TV fans as Aimee Gibbs on the raunchy Netflix hit Sex Education. Since winning a BAFTA for her hilarious and heartfelt work on that show, Wood has gone on to appear in films like The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and Living and shows like Toxic Town. The White Lotus, however, has seemingly boosted her profile into the stratosphere, earning her Emmys buzz and sparking rumors that she might be in line to join internet boyfriends Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Barry Keoghan, and Joseph Quinn in Sam Mendes’s upcoming quartet of Beatles biopics.

Right now, though, Wood is still focused on all things Chelsea. “She’s an interesting kind of contradiction because she does seem like this free spirit, but she’s also stubbornly living under this mindset that everything’s written and everything’s fated and everything is determined,” Wood thoughtfully told DECIDER when she stopped by our studio this week.

“Which is very similar to Rick. Rick feels like he can’t help what’s happening. He doesn’t have any choice,”she said. “He doesn’t have any free will.”

Over the last seven weeks, The White Lotus fans have watched the upbeat Chelsea do her best to pull Rick out of his black hole of nihilism with everything from cuddles to her faith in the cosmos. In last week’s episode, Rick might have finally found zen on his own by confronting real estate mogul Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), a man he blames for killing his do-gooder father and dooming him for life. In a preview of this weekend’s White Lotus finale, we see an incredibly concerned Chelsea beg her lover not to do “any stupid.” It’s a tense warning that Rick and Chelsea’s saga is far from over.

Ahead of this Sunday’s White Lotus Season 3 finale, we chatted with Aimee Lou Wood about all things Chelsea, Rick, astrology, fan theories and more…

DECIDER: So I adore Chelsea. I love how when you meet her, she’s a fully formed person with a personality that’s all her own However, we don’t really know a lot about her besides the fact that she was a yoga teacher, she’s from Manchester, there’s a brother… Who do you think she was before she landed in Rick’s orbit?

AIMEE LOU WOOD: It’s so interesting that you bring that up because I’ve been thinking a lot about how much of a deflector Chelsea is. Because she’s very one finger pointing, three pointing back with Rick. She’s like, “You’re so mysterious. You’re so hard to read.” And actually, she is very guarded and a mystery herself. You know, she does a lot of finding her identity through external means, i.e. Rick, astrology, enneagrams. It’s interesting.

She’s an interesting kind of contradiction because she does seem like this free spirit, but she’s also stubbornly living under this mindset that everything’s written and everything’s fated and everything is determined. So it’s like she’s free whilst also being incredibly kind of stubborn about this fated, written existence that she doesn’t have a choice in. It’s like, “I don’t have a choice here. Rick’s my soulmate. There’s no choice.” Which is very similar to Rick. Rick feels like he can’t help what’s happening. He doesn’t have any choice. He doesn’t have any free will. His life was written out for him by this fateful event that occurred when he was a baby. So they are actually quite similar in that way.

And so I think she’s a real bundle of contradictions. I think she’s very herself, whilst also being incredibly, not fully-realized on her own. You know, she’s very much kind of taken it on [that] her life’s mission is him. I think that is what a lot of anxious, attached people do, but it’s actually incredibly avoidant because it means that you don’t actually have to look at your own stuff. I’ve been saying a lot today, intimacy is “into me see,” and she doesn’t. She likes to be the “see-er.” She doesn’t particularly like being seen.

So I’ve got a whole kind of backstory for Chelsea that I also kept very secret because I think that Mike wants her to feel like this kind of ethereal thing that’s just turned up, you know? And I think that she’s incredibly smart in the way that she makes out like she’s very vulnerable and honest and revealing herself at all times.

One thing that I thought was really interesting about Chelsea and Rick is that despite all the hedonism around them, neither of them have cheated on each other throughout this week. What do you make of that and do you think it says something about their connection?

I think they’re incredibly loyal to each other. I think that’s part of their problem in a way. It’s like something that’s incredibly beautiful in one way and romantic, but also on the flip side of that is, again, this bound thing that I wonder if Chelsea did believe in free will and in choice, whether she would choose this life for herself of kind of wanting to rescue. She’s got a massive rescue complex fantasy thing going on.

But I think a lot about Esther Perel’s talking about “splitting the ambivalence.” So what a lot of couples do is, one person takes up one side of utter certainty and it pushes the other person to be utterly doubtful. Actually, most of the time, we’re somewhere in the middle. And I think, Rick and Chelsea are actually, in reality, somewhere in middle. I think he really quite loves her and I think she probably has a healthy amount of doubt. But both of them are acting out the extremes and they kind of need to meet in the middle.

I think that, you know, actions speak louder than words and they don’t cheat on each other. They don’t stray because there is something real there, but they are kind of playing out a power dynamic. I just think that they just need to find each other in the middle.

That’s really interesting because I haven’t seen the finale — we’re not getting it ahead of time — but I have seen the preview for the finale and I noticed that there’s a couple interesting shots. Like you kind of look more worried than you have all season and he looks happier than he’s been all season. Then, when we think of last week, Chelsea’s comment about the yin and the yang and kind of turmoil. Is there now gonna be a flip in that kind of tonal relationship between Rick and Chelsea now that he’s found this zen?

Well, exactly! This is the thing. It’s like the two sides of the coin. It’s hope and pain. And so, yeah, in those kinds of relationships, where it is so kind of black and white, it does flip. I think that maybe when Rick is hopeful, Chelsea has to take up the pain quota. So there is a kind of flipping around that is too extreme and they need to just find the nuance and the middle ground and the gray. But yeah, I mean, a lot happens in [Episode] 8. A lot happens. It’s 90 minutes long and there’s still so much story left. And I think that Chelsea and Rick’s, you know, it is going to surprise people.

Shifting gears, I want to ask about last week’s episode. The scene in which your character is listening and reacting to Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Saxon’s (Patrick Schwarzenegger) conversation about whether or not they’ll do something to help “Gary” (Jon Gries) out. Your face is so beautifully expressive, it’s amazing to watch. What was it like watching that scene play out and have you been amused by any of the social chatter about how great your reaction shots are?

I’ve loved people putting my face and Walton’s next to each other and being like, “These two have just been hearing the most crazy shit since they’ve been in Thailand.” And yeah, that’s my favorite acting. My favorite scenes to do is when I just get to not speak and I get to listen and respond. But I don’t know what my face is doing a lot of the time. So then, people are like, “Your face is so expressive and funny!” It’s like, “I didn’t think I was being funny.”

But yeah, those are my favorite scenes to do and it was the best. Honestly, one of the best things to watch was Patrick’s meltdown. When he started acting like there were mosquitoes landing on him and tapping them away, and he was frantic. There was one take where he like knocked over his water. He drank and it spilled all over him. And I was just like, “This boy is so good. He’s such a good actor.” So a lot of, I think, Chelsea’s faces are also just, “Wow.” It’s Aimee watching them do really good acting.

You mentioned Patrick. I saw that you put on your Instagram stories how they’re both, you believe, Aries and that is why they kind of conflict, but why there’s some kind of you know a connection there. Do you think there’s any circumstance, any world, where they might have a deeper connection were it not for Rick?

Yeah, I think that his conditioning and his upbringing has made him into this thing that seems like the antithesis of Chelsea, but actually at their core, they’re both incredibly passionate, driven, determined. They both have that tunnel vision thing. They both love their mottos and their aphorisms and everything like that. I think they are actually more similar than they seem on the surface. And I think that he does really like being seen by her. Even if it’s brutal honesty, he’s like, “Give me more. Give me more. Give me more.”

Actually, I think that he does want to see her and connect with her and she kind of bats him away. I think it’s such an amazing image of her chucking the books at him because the way that she blocks people is with spirituality. So she’s like, “Go away, here’s some stuff about spirituality. Go away.” So it’s like this weird kind of contradiction again.

But yeah, I think in another life, I think Chelsea and Saxon, with different circumstances, could have been something. Yeah, I think that it’s just a tragedy that they have clearly just been conditioned in such different ways and Saxon has, you know, a lot of it is not great.

Yeah, also on the astrology beat, there’s a really funny moment where Rick is like, “Well we’re not compatible because you’re an Aries and I’m a Scorpio.” Do you intuit that there’s some kind of placements on their charts that kind of do overlap and what do you think they are?

So I’m a Scorpio Moon in real life, and I relate to Chelsea so much that I thought she must be a Scorpio Moon. So in my head, she is a Scorpio Moon and a Pisces Rising. So I think that she can come across, she’s kind of dreamy and sweet, and then she’s there with just the fire of like, “You’re bald! You’re soulless! You are this.” She’s actually incredibly honest and that’s her Aries coming out. So I think she seems watery and then she just burns.

But I do think that the Scorpio Moon with Rick’s Scorpio Sun is the soul tie. It’s the sun and the moon bond. That’s amazing, but it can also be really incredibly intense and too intense.

I know that everyone in the cast’s having a million theories hurled at them. Is there one in particular that you really like, even if it’s totally off base?

The things that I love the most are when people pick out an item of clothing or a bit of jewelry and they analyze the hell out of it and they say what it symbolizes. I’m such an English lit geek, so I love all of that kind of analysis, even when it’s really wrong. I’m like, “The argument you’ve just presented is wonderful and that could be true.”

But I think the funniest one to me was that the monkeys did it. That was really… And I love that Michelle just came out and said, “No, they did not. It is not the monkeys. The monkey does not get the gun.” So I think that one was probably my favorite.

Also I just wrapped on a TV show and the guy who played my granddad came in with all these theories. And I was like, “Phil, you could not be more wrong.” There was one, he thought that Saxon and Chelsea were working together. They were con artists and they were acting like they didn’t know each other, but really they were conning Rick out of this, and I was like, “No. No! That is not what is occuring.” But there’s been loads.

Obviously this amazing journey is coming to an end this weekend. Can you give us a preview of what’s next for you? Because there are people who are like really hoping, they’re kind of fancasting you as Pattie Boyd in the Beatles movies, for instance. Can you give any hints about besides your show in the UK, what’s next in the docket?

I am gonna do a film and I’m very much looking forward to going more into film. Because I feel like I’ve done a lot of TV and they’re always very long journeys and oftentimes they’re left open-ended. I’m very excited to do like, “Beginning, middle, end, done!” in six weeks. So I’m going more towards films. I’ve got a TV show coming out. I’ve a TV show that I wrote, which is about films. So, yeah, there’s exciting, lovely things coming up, but I think I’m done with TV for a bit.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.