Sex Education, one of the hugely popular Netflix series, has taken the world by storm since its debut on January 11, 2019. The show has amassed a huge fan base thanks to its audacious portrayal of adolescent s*xuality and a superb ensemble cast. Earlier this year, Aimee Lou Wood, one of the main cast members, spoke about how this unexpected overnight fame has affected her and her co-stars.
Wood portrays Aimee Gibbs in a British teen comedy-drama series created by Laurie Nunn for Netflix. The narrative follows the lives of teenagers and adults as they struggle with various personal issues, many of which are connected to intimate relationships.
In fact, Wood’s performance in the second series earned her the BAFTA TV Award for Best Female Comedy Performance.
Aimee Lou Wood: Sex Education Cast Were All ‘Struggling’ With Fame
The cast of Sex Education has enjoyed widespread success, but their overnight fame was unexpected. Aimee Lou Wood, who plays Aimee Gibbs on the Netflix series, discussed how challenging it was for them to adjust to fame after the premiere of season 1. Earlier this year, she made light of this on the Capital Breakfast Show:
“You kind of have to pretend you’re taking it all in your stride and then it’s dead easy, so you’re like ‘yeah my life’s changed overnight but ya know, I know how to handle it.”
There is no denying that the entertainment industry puts a lot of pressure on its actors to live up to certain standards. The actress, 29, went on to say (via Capital Breakfast Show):
“I remember all the Sex Education a lot, kind of pretending like we did. We were all like, ‘yeah we’ve just got to go on a few . . . do some press and do some publicity, as if we knew what that was.”
The concept of fame only became more manageable when the young cast began discussing how they felt about being thrust into the spotlight:
“I remember us all around the same time going, ‘I think we’re all struggling a bit with this, I think maybe we’re all very anxious and I think maybe we need to talk about it more’. And then all of a sudden, we just started to admit we don’t actually know what we’re doing. And that has been a huge help.”
Aimee Lou Wood Discussed How The Show’s Fourth Season Has Changed
The fourth and final season of Sex Education, which premiered on September 21, 2023, was very different from the previous ones because Season 4 saw a sizable number of cast additions and departures.
Aimee Lou Wood revealed that in addition to the cast members, the plot has also changed. She earlier discussed what viewers can anticipate from the plot and the cast of characters for Season 4 in an interview with Digital Spy:
“The characters feel like they’re in very new territory because they literally are, they’re at a new school,” she said. “A lot of our feeling slightly off-centre is actually also just because of what is happening in the story, which is that they are [at] a new school. Aimee particularly – her best friend’s in America, she doesn’t have a boyfriend for the first time ever, she’s at a brand new school where she doesn’t have any mates. So there’s a lot of newness for all the characters and I think that that does make the show feel very new.”
The show was anticipated to feel “new” due to the changes in the plot and the lives of the characters. For Wood, the adjustments posed a “fun acting challenge” to maintain the consistency of the characters that the audience had come to adore:
“It’s about maintaining who they are when everything around us is different because it really does feel different. We’ve got different directors, different writers, so it’s very, very, very new which can also be exciting.”
The series by Laurie Nunn features a large ensemble cast that includes actors like Asa Butterfield, Gillian Anderson, Ncuti Gatwa, Emma Mackey, Connor Swindells, Kedar Williams-Stirling, Alistair Petrie, and Mimi Keene.
The fourth and final season of the program was made available on September 21, 2023. You can stream all four seasons of Sex Education on Netflix.
Source- Capital Breakfast Show; Digital Spy
