If you’ve watchedSex Educationon Netflix, I’m willing to bet you share my thoughts about the ensemble; everyone is so perfectly cast and I can’t imagine anyone else in the world playing any of those roles. The thing is though, one ofSex Education’s biggest breakout stars,Aimee Lou Wood, actually got pretty far along in the audition process for another role.
Not only has Wood been a scene stealer as Aimee since day one, but her incredible performance in Season 2 exploring Aimee’s experience with sexual assault made a huge impression on viewers and also wound up winning her the award for Best Female Comedy Performance at the British Academy Television Awards. After all that she’s accomplished in the part, it’s pretty wild to think that initially, Wood was vying for the role of Lily, the character now played byTanya Reynoldson the show.
With the release ofSex EducationSeason 3 right around the corner, Wood joined us for an episode ofCollider Ladies Nightto retrace the steps she’s taken in her career and, of course, a significant one is scoring a role in theSex Educationensemble. Here’s how Wood wound up auditioning for Lily first:
“From my agent, I got through this audition that was for Lily. All I saw were Lily’s sides, so I didn’t see the rest of the script. I only saw Lily’s stuff and I thought she was hilarious and the show seemed amazing. And then my friend, because of her job at the time, she read the scripts and she said to me, ‘Why aren’t you going in for Aimee? I feel like there’s a character in it called Aimee and she is your part,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got an audition for Lily.’”
After three auditions for Lily, that’s when things changed course. Here’s how Wood put it:
“It was after the third audition that they were like, ‘We’re sorry, it’s not gonna go your way with Lily.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, it’s fine. That’s really sad because I really loved the show and it was kind of the first thing for so long that I’ve been dead excited about,’ and then they said, ‘But, can you come in tomorrow with this new character, Aimee?’ And I remembered my friend saying it and then I got the sides through and I was just laughing so much because some of the things on that script were verbatim things that I have said in my life and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is it.’”
Wood had a similar response to seeing the full cast assembled for a read-through, and also reacted the same way when she first crossed paths with Reynolds during the audition process:
“I remember going to the read-through and seeing everyone and going, ‘Oh my god, yeah. Everyone is perfectly cast.’ I remember seeing Tanya actually in an audition and going, ‘Oh no, that’s Lily.’ I remember thinking, ‘No, I’ve lost the [part]. That’s Lily. That’s who they’re gonna cast as Lily.’ Because there was something always a bit not quite right with me and Lily. But it was absolutely kind of meant to be.”
While it must have been exciting to find out that herSex Educationcasting process would continue even though she didn’t book the role of Lily, one might imagine it’s a strange experience to put everything you’ve got into auditioning for one character only to have to pivot to another. Here’s how Wood put it:
“Yeah, it was weird, because I’d done chemistry reads with Erics for the scene where Lily tries it on with Eric. I’d met these different Eric boys that were going out for Eric, so I was quite far into the process with Lily and then overnight – I didn’t really have time to think about it because it was like, ‘Tomorrow come in with this part.’”
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Even with minimal time to process the switch, it turned out, Wood was already exactly where she needed to be for her Aimee audition. She continued:
“I remember Ben [Taylor], our director, he just kind of took me aside and I remember walking in and all of a sudden there were all these producers there and there’d only been like three people up until that point and then all of a sudden there was a lot of people there and I thought, ‘Okay, this is weird.’ And then Ben basically said, ‘That kind of energy that you had with Lily, just funnel it into Aimee because we think that what you were doing as Lily is actually right for Aimee.’ So it was kind of weird because it was this new character, but it was the same kind of energy that they wanted. It was just funneled into a different character, and it made so much more sense and it just aligned way more perfectly when it was Aimee.”
Looking for more from Wood? Stay tuned! We’ll have her full Collider Ladies Night conversation for you as soon as Season 3 of Sex Education drops on Netflix on September 17th.
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