Did SNL Go Too Far With Aimee Lou Wood White Potus Skit?

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live released a range of new, funny skits to keep us, their audience, entertained however, this week they made a major mistake by ridiculing the beloved Aimee Lou Wood from the latest season of The White Lotus.

Aimee Lou, best known for her roles in Sex Education and Toxic Town, played a central character in this year’s season of The White Lotus: Chelsea, a spiritual, loving and uber positive twenty eight year old.

Throughout the season fans of the show started to care and love Aimee’s character, as well as the actress off screen for her authenticity.

 

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Aimee has been extremely vocal about her past insecurities in her teeth, and how over time within the public sphere, she grew to love what she once disliked about herself. Saying that, when someone expresses an insecurity it doesn’t tend to parodied on SNL.

Saturday Night Live made that mistake this week. During the show the cast performed a long skit entitled The White Potus however, instead of pretending to be the cast from the third season, they performed as different political figures such as Donald Trump, Melania Trump, RFK Jr. and more.

Each of the skits resembled the families of the third season and were quite funny however, one of the scenes included Aimee Lou Wood’s character Chelsea, played by SNL’s Sarah Sherman.

 

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Chelsea was joined by RFK Jr. who had some interesting thoughts on what would happen if fluoride was removed from our water. The clip then cut to a caricature of Aimee Lou, ridiculing not only her teeth but her accent and portraying her character to be away in the clouds and quite dumb.

Fans of Aimee Lou were quick to notice that the sketch was out of hand and was ridiculing Aimee’s appearance for no reason as it had no relevance to the plot. Aimee took to social media last night stating that she felt the SNL sketch was “mean and unfunny”.

Wood highlighted that this upset was not caused by Sarah Sherman and that she should not be to blame for any of the backlash that the sketch is receiving. The star stated that it was “Such a shame cuz I had such a great time watching it a couple weeks ago. Yes, take the piss for sure – that’s what the show is about – but there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way?”

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The White Potus

♬ original sound – Saturday Night Live – SNL

Overall Aimee’s fans were more than supportive and agreed with the claims she made against SNL however, of course there was a small amount of backlash claiming Wood couldn’t take the joke.

She said: “I am not thin skinned. I actually love being taken the piss out of when its clever and in good spirits. But the joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth not bad teeth. I don’t mind caricature – I understand that’s what SNL is. But the rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on.”

 

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There was truly no need for Chelsea to appear in the skit. Playing her as a dumb British girl, when in reality her character was the most enlightened out of the whole cast, and making unnecessary jokes about her physical appearance, was a serious misogynistic viewpoint.

Thankfully, Wood handled the situation with pure class and will remain the people’s princess!