Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood has revealed HBO abruptly cancelled the show before she got to find out how it would have ended, leaving her to ponder what the creators had planned for the ultimate finale.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Wood, who starred as Dolores on Westworld (and also portrayed Christina in Season 4), addressed HBO's cancellation of the show. She spoke of how "awful" it was to have the plug pulled before the planned series finale because it left loose ends for both the fans and the cast.
"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 recalled. "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 continued: "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."
HBO announced in November 2022 that it would not hand out a fifth season renewal for Westworld after figures showed declining ratings between the second and third seasons. This decision meant that the fourth season finale served as the end of the series, leaving the fate of the oncoming human extinction up in the air.
The ambiguous ending left people with plenty of burning questions, including Wood, who never found out what Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan had up their sleeves for the conclusion despite prodding them for information.
"I asked the creators after we got cancelled, 'Can you please just tell me how you're going to end?' And they wouldn't tell me," Wood admitted, laughing about it. "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."
Westworld premiered in 2016 and focused on a Wild West-themed amusement park inhabited by robots that parkgoers could interact and roleplay with. Later seasons saw the robots gain sentience and free themselves from the park and into the human world, building up to a grand conflict between the two sides.
IGN's review of the fourth season finale, "Que Será, Será," which is the last we saw from the series, said, "Westworld took the story to its logical (violent, depressing) conclusion" but still managed to deliver "a few final showdowns, and a new story direction, while sifting through the ashes of last week's game-changer."
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X @AdeleAnkers.
