Evan Rachel Wood still doesn’t know how Westworld was supposed to end

The hit HBO show, Westworld, which was based on the Michael Crichton 1973 film of the same name, was a shocking and unfortunate cancellation made by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. While Zaslav has notoriously jettisoned projects in the past, Westworld was a television series that was not only up and running in its fourth season but was also a big hit for the premium cable network. The series that Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had created was building to a fifth and final season. In the wake of the cancellation back in 2022, Nolan stated that they had been fighting to conclude the series when he told THR, “We always planned for a fifth and final season. We are still in conversations with the network. We very much hope to make them.”

Evan Rachel Wood, one of the show’s stars, would address the void left by the show’s cancellation when speaking with The Hollywood Reporter while promoting her stage production of Little Shop of Horrors. Wood remarked, “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. 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. We didn’t get to have that and so 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.”

Wood also conveyed how much she’s haunted by the open threads left by the network and even tried to get the conclusion from Nolan and Joy. “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 laughed. “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.”

James Marsden was a cast member who would express his grief over the show getting the axe so suddenly. He remarked, “I’d be lying to you if I told you that the way we ended Westworld wasn’t a disappointment. I’m never going to speak without gratitude about any of my experiences, but it would have been nice to be able to complete the story we wanted to finish.”