SPOILERS are ahead for The White Lotus finale, now streaming with a Max subscription.
The White Lotus may be over on the 2025 TV schedule, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be thinking about that emotional finale for weeks to come. The last episode of Season 3 was full of surprises, but the one I can’t get out of my head is how Chelsea and Rick both ended up being dead bodies. It was especially frustrating because Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea was so innocent, and it felt like she could have definitely saved herself by simply walking away.
However, when Wood spoke to Bustle about the finale, she shared a heart-achingly solid reason why that was not in the cards for Chelsea. During the interview, it was brought up how the fan-favorite character seemed to feel like she could “fix” Walton Goggins‘ Rick, but the actress brought up how we can’t fix Chelsea either. In her words:
Patrick [Schwarzenegger] was devastated that Saxon didn’t take a bullet for Chelsea. He was like, ‘I want Saxon to die for Chelsea.’ And I’m saying, ‘But you can’t save Chelsea.’ Saxon can’t save Chelsea in the way that Chelsea can’t save Rick. People say, ‘Rick should never have taken Chelsea to Thailand and put her in harm’s way.; Do you think Rick was going ‘Chelsea, please come on my revenge quest?’ No, he was probably saying ‘Go home.’ Look at [when] she sees Rick kill Jim, she doesn’t run away. She walks towards it.
This is an extremely good point. While it’s easy to make Chelsea a victim of circumstance, under her free will, she was with Rick, and despite all the red flags and concerns in front of her, she chose to run toward the fire. As she mentioned, her co-star Patrick Schwarzenegger was even bummed that his character couldn’t have died over her, but as she continued:
She is not [helpless]. She is a tenacious, determined, strong love addict. Her higher power has become Rick and the relationship. When he says, ‘We’re going to be together forever. That’s the plan,’ she sees God in that moment.
She went on to say that maybe if her character really worked on herself, she would have made a different choice. However, tragically, that’s not how it went down:
If she went to therapy and did some deep inner work, she would probably have made a different choice. But this is what she wanted. When she says, ‘Is this a kind of ‘You killed my father, prepare to die’ thing?’ He says, ‘I don’t know.’ Now, anyone in their right mind finding out that their boyfriend might be a killer will go, ‘I’m going to step away now, darling.’ But she hugs him. She’s not scared. She’s so childlike, curious, endearing, funny, and lovely that people want to save her. But she’s a grown woman.
There’s a lot of talk about Rick being the one to be worried about because he was on a revenge mission to kill the man who killed his father. However, Chelsea sees and hears the place Rick is in, and rather than saving herself, she chooses the path of loving him and sticking by him, even trying to “save” him during their Thailand vacation.
During the interview, Wood also shared how she thinks the character has “so much shit she has not dealt with and processes” and looks to things like the zodiac, spirituality books, aphorisms and mantras to soothe and make sense of things. And while Chelsea thinks she’s being drawn to Rick through “fate,” it’s really “some unhealed shit.”
Wood’s comments about Chelsea offer some bigger insights into what her character and Rick are exploring as the season itself as a whole got into the theme of spirituality and religion with its various characters. We were spending our time having theories about Rick and his father, but I can’t believe I didn’t see Chelsea and Rick’s emotional death scenes coming.
As we continue to process the season, check out the cast’s picks for Season 4 actors and our thoughts about where The White Lotus could be set.
