Evan Rachel Wood Says Starring In Westworld Helped Her Overcome Trauma 

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, and the gradual empowerment of her character Dolores, helped her to work through personal trauma. During the show’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, per

, Wood gave an unexpectedly heartfelt answer to a question about playing Dolores.

“It’s almost hard to talk about it because I get really emotional, because working on the show changed my life in many different ways,” Wood explained. “I knew that I wasn’t going to stay this kind of damsel in distress, that I would become strong, but my little brain didn’t go much further than that, or didn’t fully grasp how deep it was going to go, and just how profound it was going to be, and how she finds her strength. I had no idea.”

Dolores starts out as a robot with no personal autonomy, doomed to endlessly participate in a narrative loop which invariably ends with her being raped, and gradually gains strength and insight through the season. Wood spoke out about her own experience of sexual assault last year, and says that Dolores’s evolution had a powerful impact on her as an actress: “To go on that journey with her and learn things about myself, and to put my own experiences in what she was going through, and using that as a vehicle to walk through my own false reality, or my own repressed memories or trauma and breaking through and coming out on the other side,” Wood recalled. “It was just transformative and fun. I just gave everything. I would drive home covered in bruises and blood, and be happy, because it was for something amazing.”

Westworld’s second season begins filming this month, and will air in 2018.

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