Westworld star Shannon Woodward was surprised people thought her character was dead
On Sunday night’s episode of Westworld, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” Delos programmer Elsie Hughes (Shannon Woodward), last seen getting attacked by Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) in season 1, was revealed to be alive and well and chained to the wall of a cave. Fans were surprised. Woodward, however, was confused. “That surprised me,” she told Inverse. “People come up to me all the time and are like ‘are you dead?’ and it just gets really meta. I’m like, ‘wait, am I dead? Like as a human person, is Shannon dead? Why do people keep asking me this?’”
Moving on to the episode itself, Elsie was understandably hesitant to trust Bernard after what happened in season 1. But now, Woodward said that Elsie doesn’t have “time to do anything but accept it. I just think that struggling with that emotionally is a luxury that she doesn’t have.”
Speaking with Vulture, Woodward talked a little about Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy, who also directed “The Riddle of the Sphinx.” It sounds like she’s a good boss:
"It’s a dream [being directed by Lisa]. Especially because I think I kind of play Lisa on the show, or a version of her, and [co-creator Jonathan Nolan] kind of inserted that into the narrative. I clocked that after the first season. I told her, I was like, “You know I play you, right?” Now I’ve seen her sign autographs, “The OG Elsie, Lisa Joy.”"
Completing her rounds, Woodward also talked with Entertainment Tonight about the plot speculation that goes down on set, Westworld being a show with a very twisty, complicated story. After castmates get their scripts, the lot of them gather and begin “theorizing with each other and go, ‘Oh, oh! I saw something the other day.'”
"So, we have this whole other added thing. We’re there, so we feel like the answers must be just at our fingertips, or sometimes we know they’re in frame, so we’re looking around at the set trying to see if we can figure anything out. It’s like living in an AR game."
Woodward’s favorite speculation buddy is Even Rachel Wood, who plays revolutionary host leader Dolores Abernathy. Together, they try to tally up the clues in hopes of understanding just what’s happening on this crazy show:
"Evan loves this stuff — we talk about it all the time — but I think we’re all really into it. Some of the actors are purists, like, ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to read it. I just want to watch it and find out. And I’ll just see my scenes and it will be like a surprise that I’m part of the story.’ It’s fun."
Finally, Woodward weighed in on a popular fan theory: is it possible that Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), one of the founders of Westworld, is actually alive in some form or another? Woodward tried to shut it down:
"I mean, Ford’s dead. They shot him in the head. They really shot him in the head, and then they showed the head."
That sounds an awful lot like David Benioff and Dan Weiss trying to convince Game of Thrones fans that Jon Snow was dead and not coming back for season 6. We’ll believe it when we don’t see it.
Next: Westworld season 2, Episode 4 recap: “The Riddle of the Sphinx”
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