evan rachel wood

For those (like me) missing ‘Westworld’ since the finale of Season 2 a few weeks ago, Comicbook.com recently had an interview with Dolores herself, Evan Rachel Wood, which shed some light on the new season and offered some tantalizing hints about what we could expect from her character in Season 3.

First, let’s talk about the major death Wood confirmed, which, as you might have already guessed, was indeed Teddy, who we last saw being uploaded to the Valley Beyond which has essentially become the Host version of “Heaven.” In her words:

“Teddy is dead. Yeah, he’s definitely dead…”It’s so sad. Yeah, James and I were devastated because we’ve lived with those characters for so long and so I really felt like I was breaking up with somebody. Like I actually felt like a relationship was ending and so those scenes, when we did them were genuinely very emotional.”

However, she did add “it’s Westworld, you never know,” which is true as they could have all kinds of ways of bringing Teddy back if they really wanted to (more to say on this later).

On the topic of Season 3, Wood had the following to say:

“I think now, Season Three, she’ll be in the real world apparently. And I think that’s gonna be really interesting for her because now she is actually alone. Because unfortunately through hard decisions that she had to make, some that she may even regret, we’ve lost Teddy which was devastating…We do know that Dolores has taken a lot of pearls with her. Who are those pearls? I don’t know. I know there’s also a mystery pearl in the Hale body because once Dolores got out of Hale and rebuilt herself and rebuilt Bernard she kept the Hale body and that Hale is now going out into the real world with her but we have no idea who’s in there.”

Of course, the biggest surprise about Dolores in Season 2 had to do with the fact that in the “11 days later” timeline of the series, Dolores was actually inside a Host version of Charlotte Hale pretending to be the head of the park, which enabled her to track down Peter Abernathy’s pearl and eventually escape the island. When asked about how much of this storyline she knew, Wood replied:

“They didn’t tell us. I had a weird feeling that there were going to be two Doloreses in some form or another. I’ve had this theory since season one and so I went, I started kind of, I read the second episode and then I always try to pay attention to what people are saying on set and weird things they don’t want to tell me. And then I texted Lisa Joy episode two and I went, okay I got a theory. I think I’m already outside of the park, I think I slipped out somehow and somehow there’s two of me and so while everyone was distracted over here somehow I’m gonna get out and then all the stuff we’re seeing with Wyatt is like, that’s already happened. And she was like, stop bugging the writer’s room, stop it, get out, don’t tell anyone this. But I didn’t know that I was gonna be in a completely different body. I thought maybe the clone that Ford was making was another Dolores which technically kind of was but it was actually Hale. But I know those writers are so smart and I was like, if everyone thinks that that clone is Ford it’s not gonna be Ford because that’s what they obviously want people to think.”

Wood also offered a tip for fans confused about when it is actually Charlotte and when it is really Dolores:

“Here’s a tip: if you’re like, ‘Well when is she Tessa and when is she not?’ Any time Tessa is in the timeline with Skarsgard, she’s technically [Dolores]. So if you go back and watch it, that’s how you know the difference. And any time she’s with Bernard, that’s real Hale.”

Very interesting stuff indeed, though to be fair, I’ll probably still go back and rewatch the season with the new Charlotte = Dolores information (in the “11 days later” timeline) just to see the nuances of the performances and any other hints she may have given.

As for the loss of Teddy, I have a feeling he will not be gone forever. The survival of the Hosts in their new world seems like a bargaining chip humanity can still use against Dolores if need be and pulling Teddy out and throwing him back into a physical body would be a cool way to prove to Dolores that they actually do have access to that world. But that’s just one of my theories for the distant future of the show.

Do you have any? Feel free to share them in the comments below!