Aimee Lou Wood compares filming White Lotus to a reality show

It’s of the nature of the beast for any really big TV show to create an attendant cloud of drama—the public inferring tension between stars based off of the inexact science of reading social media tea leaves, or trying to parse inside jokes as signs of deep interpersonal strife. It got especially bad surrounding HBO’s latest season of The White Lotus, though, possibly because the series arrived as we’re all well and truly cooking in our own brain juices, or maybe because the format of the show encourages it, what with the way it sequesters a bunch of big-name and rising stars far from home and asks them to embody complicated, frequently fucked-up people.

That’s certainly one of the takeaways from a clear-the-air profile Variety ran this week with stars Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood, who played lovers on the season, and who’ve been the subject of myriad rumors that they don’t get along. And if the entire purpose of the piece was just to kill that story dead before Emmy season rolls around, well, it does a pretty good job: As depicted, Goggins and Wood are effusively positive toward each other, in ways that seem to transcend “the PR people told us to play nice,” complete with what are described as multiple, lengthy hugs. Part of their public distance since the show aired (including Goggins unfollowing Wood on social media, much noticed by Instagram prophets) simply stemmed from needing to decompress from the intensity of the filming, which often left performers siloed in their particular character groupings—and especially Goggins and Wood, who didn’t join in on some of the more communal behind-the-scenes moments. Or, to quote Wood: “We’d never lived on a set. This is the first time we were all experiencing basically a reality TV show. I think we both struggle with work-life balance anyway, so it’s hard because there’s not even separation in distance.”