Why Are We So Fascinated By the Rumours About Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood?

Nobody in Hollywood is there to make friends. It’s a cutthroat industry, and scratching your way to the top requires a ruthless streak a mile wide. Yet displays of naked ambition are typically frowned upon by spectators, and it’s preferred that, when promoting your latest project, you talk effusively of your colleagues. Ideally, you should all act like BFFs for the duration of the promotional circuit, bragging about your group chat in-jokes and sharing tales on talk shows about the amazing nights out you had during your weekends off. Sometimes this does happen. You can meet your future best friend during work, even one as high-pressure as a film or TV set. But most of us don’t have to maintain an illusion of platonic love as part of our jobs. When the veil slips, people tend to notice.

Case in point: season three of The White Lotus. Mike White’s anthology drama is now a big enough deal to demand weekly recaps, TikTok speculation, and fancasts for future arcs. It’s helped to elevate a number of rising stars and established character actors, bringing with them far more attention than prior work had elicited. This time around, the lion’s share of focus fell upon Walton Goggins, longtime character actor, and Aimee Lou Wood, best known for her BAFTA-winning performance on Sex Education. The pair played Rick and Chelsea, lovers with a sizeable age gap who holiday at the eponymous resort where a good time is not guaranteed. The chemistry was good and the show greatly increased their profiles, with Wood arguably emerging as the season’s true breakout star.

Rumours very quickly started spreading that Goggins and Wood had fallen out. They seemed to have unfollowed one another on Instagram at some point during the season’s run. Goggins would share posts featuring other cast members and tag them all, but not Wood, which made some people theorize that she’d blocked him. Goggins posted a very sentimental post about their characters on Instagram and thanked Wood ‘for being my partner.’ Jason Isaacs added fuel to the fire in a Vulture interview where he said that ‘there were friendships that were made and friendships that were lost’ among the cast.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Walton Goggins (@waltongogginsbonafide)

Then things got messier when Goggins praised the SNL sketch parodying The White Lotus that Wood had said she found hurtful and unfunny. Goggins quickly deleted that post, but for those who believed the pair were feuding, it only confirmed their suspicions. Most recently, Goggins’ publicist called time on an interview when the very rude interviewer wouldn’t stop asking him about the supposed falling out. The writer fully admitted that he was less interested in Goggins promoting his current project than he was in the speculation about him and Wood. I imagine it garnered him some good page view numbers, but it made him seem like a d*ck. It also didn’t help to change the now out-of-control narrative.

AND THEN, while I was writing this piece, the pair refollowed one another on Instagram, inspiring even more headlines.

Everyone had theories, most prominently that they believed Goggins and Wood may have had an affair during the shooting of The White Lotus (Goggins is married) and that it ended poorly. But let’s just get this out of the way. We have absolutely no idea what happened between Goggins and Wood, if anything did actually happen. There is no hard evidence or confirmation from either party over a falling out or anything more nefarious. Both people have been keen to not fuel any fires or add to burgeoning narratives. Anyone who claims otherwise, says they have proof or some inside knowledge about what went down is lying. As with many pieces of celebrity gossip, what we have here is a lot of theories, conjecture, and outright fantasy. But as we’ve seen through countless other examples, that’s more than enough to keep people fascinated with this story.

Celebrity affairs and cheating scandals, real or imagined, are perhaps the platonic ideal for juicy gossip. It’s a relatable issue while still being low-stakes enough in the grand scheme of things for people to feel safe speculating about it. It’s also something that almost everyone has strong opinions about. Infidelity makes us mad, but so do myriad narratives surrounding it. There’s an easy moral judgment to be made, and one that helps to fuel our future feelings on these people. To this day, I see people call Angelina Jolie a husband stealer, and those same creeps never have the same ire for Brad Pitt (or the very serious abuse allegations against him). In this case, many have already made up their minds as to whether they’re Team Walton or Team Aimee, even though we’re still in the depths of pure speculation.

All of this is happening because of social media. It’s not just that such stories can be spun from nothing via the magic of Twitter and TikTok, but that the people involved were seen to be using their own platforms suspiciously. This is a story that was spun almost entirely out of Instagram follows and tags. We didn’t see a ton of ‘sources’ running to the trades for a he-said/she-said battle. There weren’t any crew members of The White Lotus sharing titbits of behind-the-scenes gossip. What has unfolded has been the epitome of 2025 gossip, for better or worse (let’s be honest: probably the latter).

It is very weird that this is a normal part of celebrity gossip now. Someone unfollows another person and it’s a sign of a fiery feud. A stray ‘like’ can send fans into a tailspin. Tracking such things quickly becomes the stuff of conspiratorial rambling, and yet it’s also fodder for so many articles and think-pieces and so-called experts who claim to know the absolute truth of the matter. Sometimes it can be handy, like when a celebrity engages with bigoted content in a positive manner. Mostly, however, it just makes us all a bit barmy. All too often, a tweet is just a tweet.

Maybe something will come out about this pair and whatever went down in Thailand. They could be dealing with a messy split or a professional falling out. Or perhaps they don’t care about anything going on and just didn’t want to follow one another on Instagram. I think this has become a storm in a teacup because it’s seen as fun but with minimal collateral damage, and it’s related to two actors who aren’t A-listers but are well-liked and easy to root for. Their on-screen chemistry helps, because we’re in this weird cultural period where actors being good at their job leads to furious theorizing that they must actually be f*cking once the director calls ‘cut.’ This is a story that feels like a reasonably light-hearted alternative to the current gossip sphere, which is dominated by Nazi Kanye, J.K. Transphobe, and girlbosses in space. It’s a victimless story, unless you’re Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins (or his wife).

From the perspective of this hardened gossip hound, this story was undeniably fascinating. Not because of the ephemeral rumours of a falling out or affair, but because of how it took something so anodyne as an Instagram unfollow to mutate into this nightmare. It’s a reminder, if nothing else, that social media management is now the expected norm for celebrities and not a thing you can overlook. But the meat of this gossip? What meat? There’s so little for us to dissect, and yet we’ve gotten so much from it. This is what gossip looks like in the social media age. If I were Walton Goggins, I’d walk out of the interview, too.