Evan Rachel Wood still doesn't know how Westworld was supposed to end: 'They wouldn't tell me'

For four seasons, Westworld warned viewers that "These violent delights have violent ends." Unfortunately for fans of the twisty sci-fi drama, HBO pulled the plug before series creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan could deliver the ending they'd planned for a fifth and final season.

Now Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood is revealing that she still doesn't know how Joy and Nolan intended to wrap things up — and the mystery "does still keep me up at night."

"I asked the creators after we got canceled, 'Can you please just tell me how you're going to end?' And they wouldn't tell me," Wood said with a laugh in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "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."

Inspired by the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, Westworld centered on a futuristic theme park where androids known as "hosts" are preyed up by human guests living out Wild West fantasies. Wood played Dolores Abernathy, a long-serving host who gains sentience and leads a robot uprising. The series also starred Thandiwe Newton, Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris Tessa Thompson, and Aaron Paul.

After premiering to fanfare and critical acclaim in 2016, Westworld saw its ratings decline over time, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused a two-year gap between the season 3 finale and the season 4 premiere. HBO canceled the show in November 2022, about three months after the season 4 finale.

"It was devastating in a lot of ways because, first of all, they don't tell us where the show is going. We were just always told, 'We know how the show ends,' when we started," Wood told THR. "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."

She added 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."

Prior to the show's cancellation, Joy and Nolan told EW that they were hoping for one more season to play out their endgame. "We never broke [the show] with an exact number of seasons left," Joy said, "but then when we were writing [season 4], we were like, 'We can get it up to the precipice before we round it out with what we had always planned would happen in the fifth season.' So we have, like Dolores, one more story to tell — and whether we get to tell it, we'll see."

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