Evan Rachel Wood has opened up about the second season of Westworld, insisting “season 1 was a walk in the park compared to what’s coming up.”
I recently had the chance to talk to the the 30-year-old actress, who plays the host Dolores Abernathy in the hit HBO show, about her turn in “Allure.”
Towards the end of our chat I turned the conversation to “Westworld,” at which point Evan Rachel Wood provided me with the update of, “We just finished shooting and we are already doing press for it. They don’t give us a second.”
I then asked Wood how it felt to return to the show now that their characters have completely changed, and she candidly confided that it was “much more difficult.”
“Because the game has changed and the characters changed. I mean, we are basically all coming back and we are resurrecting our characters but they are not the same.”
“It was like, ‘OK, I know this character so well. But now I am a different version of her so what does this look like?’ That’s the beauty of the show.”
“It was nerve-racking because we are not allowed to have all of the information, sometimes we are doing the episodes out of order. We sometimes even did scenes for episodes that hadn’t even been read. No-one knows what is happening. We’d turn up on set and go, ‘What episode is this? What happened just before? What is about to happen?’ Then we’d work in those parameters.”
Wood also noted that the sheer size and scale of each of the episodes meant that they were basically “filming 10 movies in 6 months,” a prospect that she found both “terrifying and never-racking.”
“We had no time. We did everything in the second season so quickly. Like, actors would only get 2 takes, because we just had to keep going. It’s frustrating when you love something so much and you want it be perfect.”
“But there’s an element to this process that is a lot like the guests go through in ‘Westworld.’ There’s an urgency, and the actors are stripped down to their most primal aspect, because we’re so confused.”
I then enquired about the level of trust that’s needed between the actors and “Westworld’s” writers in order to do the material justice.
“There’s a massive amount of trust between us and the writers. It’s usually our jobs to take the information and create the arc, and find where things are going to happen.”
“But in this case it is all about being in the moment. It’s strange playing a role that you helped create but now belongs to so many people. It’s not just me. It’s bigger than me at this point. And there is a huge responsibility to that.”
We’ll get to see how Evan Rachel Wood fares in the second season of “Westworld” when it finally returns to our screens on April 22.
