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Evan Rachel Wood in ‘Westworld’
John Johnson/HBO
Evan Rachel Wood knows as much as the fans when it comes to what Western world Creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan had the final season of their hit HBO series up their sleeves, meaning she doesn’t know anything about anything.
Wood, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter before her New York stage debut as Audrey in the off-Broadway production of Little shop of horrorsrevealed during the meeting that he had asked the Western world creators about where the show was headed after the fourth season finale, “Que Sera Sera.” In it, humanity, and most sentient life, essentially ends after a season in which the park’s androids took control, shifting the scale of power to control humans as the hosts once did.
After a series of moves that see virtually the entire main cast die, Wood’s character Dolores, the oldest continuous host of the original park and the first to achieve self-awareness, is given the opportunity to give humanity one last chance. . “Some can escape death for a few months. Maybe even years. But ultimately your kind will become extinct,” she says in a wide-ranging final monologue. “They will only live as long as the last creature that remembers them. And that creature is me.”
On a mission to see his love, Teddy (James Marsden), and get a taste of humanity’s second chance on the Sublime (a digital plane of existence created by the creator of Westworld), the show teased a return to the circuit, based on Dolores’ vision of a new world. speaking to THR In 2022, Joy expressed why, even though the season four finale had its own kind of poetic send-off, there was still room, in her opinion, for another. Western world season.
But on November 4, HBO revealed that it would not renew the series, which had faced declining ratings between seasons two and three, for a fifth season.
Now, Wood, whose character was instrumental to the series and the direction of the show’s final episodes, tells THR that the abruptness of the cancellation was difficult for both the cast and the audience due to the nature of how Nolan and Joy reveal the story.
“It was devastating in many ways because, first of all, they don’t tell us where the show is going. They always told us, ‘We know how the show ends’ when we started,” he explains. “They didn’t write it down as we went along. They had an idea and we were all on a bed of nails waiting to see and hear what the conclusion of this was. Which meant everything.
“We couldn’t have that, so after building an arc and a character for almost 10 years and not getting the payoff at the end to see where everything was going, I think for us and the audience, it was horrible.” in many ways,” adds Wood.
With the story seemingly at the end of the road, Wood said he reached out to Joy and Nolan to see where they could have taken the show. But neither of them revealed their ending.
“After we got canceled, I asked the creators, ‘Can you tell me how you’re going to end it?’ And they didn’t tell me,” Wood says, laughing. “I think because, I don’t know, maybe somehow, in some iteration, we can finish it, but I don’t know yet. He still keeps me up at night.”
Following the show’s cancellation, Wood’s co-star Marsden spoke out last January and called its unplanned ending a “disappointment,” a sentiment echoed by co-star Luke Hemsworth in November 2022.
“I’d be lying to you if I told you that the way we ended Western world “It wasn’t a disappointment,” Marsden said. “I will never speak without gratitude about any of my experiences, but it would have been nice to be able to complete the story we wanted to finish. I love this Western world family. It was one of those unique opportunities to be a part of something where I would also be sitting at home eagerly awaiting the next episode as a fan.”
The actor added that while he understood the financial conversations surrounding the show’s production, “great shows have to have big audiences to be worth the expense.”
“I just wish it was more than just a financial success,” he continued. “But who knows, maybe there is some world where it can be completed somehow. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking because I know we had plans to finish it the way we wanted.”