Aimee Lou Wood is standing by her decision to call out “Saturday Night Live” over its portrayal of her in a “White Lotus” sketch earlier this year.
In April, “SNL” player Sarah Sherman depicted Wood’s “White Lotus” character Chelsea with an exaggerated accent and large false teeth as the punch line to a joke about fluoride. Wood fired back via Instagram that the spoof was “mean and unfunny.”
“Yes, take the piss for sure — that’s what the show is about —but there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way?” Wood wrote at the time. This led to Sherman sending Wood flowers and saying she “obviously never meant to hurt anyone’s feelings … I feel terrible that anyone would feel bad.”
Now, in a new interview with BBC News, Wood said she has no regrets about making her feelings known. “I don’t regret saying it because it was breaking a pattern, which is what I would usually do — what I did when I was younger and got bullied,” Wood told the publication.
After seeing the sketch, Wood said she thought: “I have a choice here to go in and be embarrassed about it and just say, ‘I didn’t like that. It was mean’. … No matter what chaos came from it, I’m still happy for me and my personal journey that I said something.”
Wood added that she’s been in meetings before with directors where she’s “burst into tears and not been able to say a word.”
“I think that kind of urge is always to correct, to say ‘I’m so sorry that I just did something messy’ and actually you didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
Wood also addressed the “SNL” scandal in her Variety cover story with co-star Walton Goggins back in June, saying: “I know for a fact a man wrote that. It wasn’t Sarah Sherman, don’t hate on her.”
She continued, “The punch line should not be how I look. That’s what bothered me. Do the caricature, because that’s what ‘SNL’ is. It felt misogynistic. It felt like the punch line was a woman’s appearance, which is just not funny. It’s not cool.”
From Variety US