Evan Rachel Wood, who starred on HBO’s Westworld as Dolores, has discussed the show’s abrupt cancellation, saying it was “devastating” in part because she doesn’t know how the series was supposed to end.
“We were just always told, ‘We know how the show ends,’ when we started,” she said. “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.”
When HBO announced that Westworld would end with Season 4, and the planned fifth season would not go ahead, Wood said she and her castmates were caught off guard.
“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,” she said.
Wood said she asked Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan how they planned for the show to end, but “they wouldn’t tell me,” Wood said with a laugh.
“I think because, I don’t know, maybe somehow, someway, in some iteration we’ll get to finish it, but I still don’t know. It does still keep me up at night,” Wood said.
Despite HBO cancelling Westworld before its fifth season, Wood and the cast still got paid. A report said HBO opted to cancel Westworld world due in part to the show’s declining ratings.
James Marsden, who played another lead role on Westworld, said he understands the business reasons why Westworld got canceled–it’s an expensive show that didn’t get enough viewers. However, Marsden said he remains hopeful that the show might eventually come back so it can be finished in “the way we wanted to.”
Westworld was not only canceled, but the series was removed from Max and sold to Roku and Tubi. Programming boss Casey Bloys said he spoke with Nolan and Joy before making this move, and the idea was to find a way to make more money off Westworld.
“I think people sometimes forget there is a vast majority of the population that don’t want to pay anything for a streaming service, not only [in the US], but internationally,” Bloys said. “In the same way that Netflix was a brand new thing, let’s throw some shows up there and expose it to a new audience and see how it does. I think you have to kind of dip your toe in and see what’s out there.”
