LIVING PROOF
Hollywood actress Evan Rachel Wood talks about how she worked through her personal trauma and demons as part of her role in HBO’s dystopic, sci-fi show ‘Westworld’, season two of which premieres tonight in the UAE
When Evan Rachel Wood needs a jolt of confidence, she puts on a certain playlist, a compendium of feminist anthems and feisty classics — I Will Survive,
These Boots Are Made for Walking, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, some head-whipping grunge and hip-hop.
It was piping through her house in Nashville, Tennessee, one chilly afternoon last month. Wood, the actress and musician, had just put herself through an emotional wringer: She testified before Congress, in unflinching terms, about being a survivor of sexual violence, then jetted to Los Angeles to perform songs by David Bowie, her musical idol, with his bandmates. It was a cross-country headsnap. Now she was welding herself back together.
“My life is definitely going places I did not foresee,” she said, leaning over her kitchen counter. “But I’m going with it. It doesn’t feel like a choice at this point. This is just what I need to do.”
Her trajectory is even more remarkable when you consider how much it overlaps, thematically, with the storyline of Dolores, her character on the HBO series
Westworld. On that sci-fi drama, set in a Western theme park where visitors can act out their most depraved fantasies with humanlike robot “hosts,” Dolores is an innocent and much-abused host who slowly awakens to the darkness of what has befallen her, and then fights her way out.
A critical darling when it aired in 2016,
Westworld had the most-watched debut season of any HBO series, and anticipation for its new season, which begins tonight at midnight in the UAE, is high.
In a starry ensemble that included Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Jeffrey Wright, it was the women, like Wood and Thandie Newton, as a host madam who’s newly conscious of her reality, that were riveting, in part for how they endured — and inflicted — violence.
The show, Wood said, “completely transformed my entire life,” not because it catapulted her career — although it did — but because playing Dolores forced her to drill into her own struggles. “Her journey mirrored so much of what I had been through and what I was going through,” she said. “It gave me a strength that I did not know I had.”
For Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the married co-creators of Westworld, Wood was first an exceedingly “protean” actor, as Nolan said in a joint phone interview. Wood, 30, has been in front of the camera since childhood, graduating from volatile adolescents in movies like Thirteen to a vampire queen on True Blood.
They cast her knowing she could pull off the lightning shifts that Dolores makes in season two, which finds her exacting sweet revenge even as she weighs its costs. “With Evan’s character, I wanted to explore a hero who has flaws and had a history that was trauma and sadness, but who could overcome that,” said Joy, a writer, producer and director of the series with her husband.
“To me, that’s an inspiring story, and a story that can teach. And Evan, because she is so strong and she is that person, was able to unleash even more of that strength than I imagined.”
Wood did not necessarily feel heroic when she travelled to Washington — her second time there, after the 2017
“Dolores’ [her character] journey mirrored so much of what I had been through and what I was going through.” EVAN RACHEL WOOD | Actress