Evan Rachel Wood recalls "devastating," "awful" Westworld cancellation

Back in 2016, Westworld was the hot new show on the block, a bold sci-fi series that asked big questions about humanity, artificial intelligence, and extinction. People were thrilled by the first season, which ended with the robot hosts in a futuristic theme park rebelling against their human creators. Things held mostly steady in season 2, but when season 3 took things outside the park, people started to lose interest. By the time season 4 rolled around, the show wasn't commanding nearly as much attention as it once had, and HBO canceled it towards the end of 2022.

Ironically, this was right before everyone started talking about generative articifical intelligence, which may have given the show a new infusion of buzz. In any case, the cast and crew didn't get to make what was intended to be a fifth and final season; the fourth ends with the robotic host Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) beginning to play out a computer simulation to determine if any part of humanity is worth saving. That would have been the theme of season 5, and that's what we'll never get to see.

Wood took the news hard. “It was devastating in a lot of ways because, first of all, [creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] don’t tell us where the show is going," she told The Hollywood Reporter. "We were just always told, ‘We know how the show ends,’ when we started. They weren’t writing it as we went along. They had an idea, and we were all just on a bed of nails waiting to see and hear what the conclusion of this was. What it all meant.”

"We didn’t get to have that. After building an arc and a character for almost 10 years and not getting the payoff at the end to see where it was all going—I think for us and the audience, it was awful in a lot of ways."

Worse, Wood didn't even get to find out how the show was supposed to end. Nolan and Joy wouldn't tell her. “I think because, I don’t know, maybe somehow, someway, in some iteration we’ll get to finish it," she speculated, "but I still don’t know. It does still keep me up at night.”

Cast members like James Marsden have expressed hope that they'll be able to finish the series someday, but it's anybody's guess whether that will actually happen. I wouldn't count on it. Not only did HBO cancel Westworld, it removed the show from the Max streaming service, so it's no longer easily accessible, although they were showing it with ads on FAST services like Roku and Tubi. Still, its future is uncertain at best.

As for whether Nolan and Joy know the ending of Westworld but just aren't telling, I have my doubts. The show got less and less coherent as it went on, which makes me think there was at least a little bit of "making-it-up-as-we-go-along"-type writing happening. But obviously Wood would know better than I.

Wood is currently making her New York stage debut as Audrey in a production of Little Shop of Horros. As for Nolan and Joy, they went on to create a sci-fi series for Amazon Prime Video called The Peripheral which was also canceled. And this April, they'll debut a new Amazon TV series based on the Fallout video games. That's two strikes and...

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