Shailene Woodley talks to "Vanity Fair"

Source: Vanity Fair

The Fault in Our Stars, which took Woodley to Amsterdam (where she had gone backpacking at 18) and to Pittsburgh, is a beautiful modern love story about two teenagers, Hazel and Gus, with a heartbreaking twist. Director Josh Boone says, “I told the studio it’s like Titanic, except the iceberg is cancer.” 

Woodley was so moved by Green’s novel—which has sold seven million copies worldwide and has been translated into 46 languages—that she reached out to the author directly. “She wrote me a long—very long—e-mail before the movie rights even sold,” Green says. “I remember being sort of overwhelmed by it, because it was so long and so positive, and she was so relentless in her certainty that she should play Hazel.”

Woodley also made an unusual impression on the director. “She was such a strange, interesting person,” Boone says of his first encounter with the actress. “She talks about health and is really passionate about what she believes; I wasn’t sure what to make of her.” At her audition the next morning, the director says, “she was the character Hazel. She wasn’t at all the girl I had met the night before, but over the course of getting to know her she is exactly who she is. I had forgotten how idealistic you can be in your 20s. I’m cynical, and she is really inspiring because she is so not.” 

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If you ever lose your way in the hills above Los Angeles, or elsewhere, you’ll want Shailene Woodley by your side. “See all of that beautiful stuff?” the 22-year-old actress says, pointing at a patch of green vegetation just off the hiking trail in Fryman Canyon Park. “It’s called miner’s lettuce. If you’re ever stranded in the wild, you can eat all of that.”

Dressed in a white T-shirt and high-waisted skinny jeans, with a cell phone tucked into her back pocket, Woodley would look like any other millennial were it not for her perfectly lithe figure, her increasingly famous face, and, perhaps, her choice of water container. In lieu of a designer bottle, Woodley clutches a glass Mason jar. She stops to admire the vistas and picks up bits of trash left behind by other hikers—a plastic cap, a wrapper—and squeezes them into the pockets of her jeans. 

Woodley isn’t your average twentysomething starlet. She’s part of a new breed, epitomized by Jennifer Lawrence, who pride themselves on, well, being themselves. But whereas Lawrence is the endearingly clumsy southern gal, Woodley is like a forest sprite who might be doing something more wholesome with her life if filmmakers weren’t so eager to give her one starring role after another. 

Hollywood was built on the backs of young actresses, from Shirley Temple to Judy Garland to Elizabeth Taylor and beyond, but today’s generation has to contend with a media environment that is far more complicated—and precarious—than the ones the studio chiefs of the 20th century manipulated for their own purposes. In an era when any false move can be broadcast by one fan to millions of others in the blink of an eye, authenticity isn’t just a pose—it’s a requirement.

Like Lawrence, whose first two Hunger Games movies have grossed a combined $800 million, Woodley has her own post-apocalyptic young-adult franchise, Divergent, based on the best-selling series of novels by the 25-year-old writer Veronica Roth. The first installment, which came out in March, has already earned $145 million and will spin off three more. This month, Woodley will carry another much-anticipated film, The Fault in Our Stars—based on John Green’s beloved young-adult novel, which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 120 weeks—into cineplexes worldwide. The preview is the most-liked trailer in the history of YouTube. 

“Shai,” as she is called by her friends and family, grew up in Simi Valley, California (home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library), and started acting at around age five. “But it took a long time,” she remembers. “I had 500 nos before I had one yes—and it was a Honda commercial.” She went on to star in about 40 commercials before landing her first lead role, in the ABC Family television series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, in 2008. (In the meantime, Woodley was diagnosed with scoliosis. “I wore a back brace 18 hours a day for two years straight,” she says.)

An even bigger break came when, after an exhaustive search, director Alexander Payne cast her as George Clooney’s daughter in the Oscar-winning The Descendants. The part earned Woodley a Film Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress. At first, Woodley wasn’t sure she was ready for her newfound success and mused aloud about quitting acting to become an herbalist, exploring her interest in medicinal plants. “Somebody came to me and said, ‘I can’t wait to see what you do next.’ I took that as pressure—that I had to live up to somebody else’s expectations,” she recalls. “There were a few months where I was like, ‘I don’t want to act anymore.’ And then I got over it and realized it’s none of my business what other people think of me.” 

The other big takeaway Woodley got from her first film was Clooney himself. “He has been an angel in my life for many reasons,” she says of Hollywood’s perennial Everyman. She credits the actor for reaffirming everything she was taught to believe in. “He knew everyone’s name on set,” she says. “He treated everyone as an equal and everyone got his warmth.” 

The admiration is mutual. “Shailene can do whatever she wants,” Clooney says. “If she wants to be a movie star, she has it. If she wants to change the world, she will. Her talent and kindness go hand in hand.”

Despite her chosen profession, Woodley didn’t grow up in front of the television or watching movies. “My parents were like, ‘Great, we have a free weekend. Let’s go camping!’ So I grew up outdoors, not really ever sitting on the couch.” 

Woodley’s parents are psychologists who work in education, and she credits them with giving her perspective on the constant disappointment that comes with being an actor. “I never saw it as rejection,” she says. “I saw it as an opportunity to get better. Also, I learned over time that it obviously has to do with your acting, but it has a lot to do with luck.” Her parents divorced when she was 15; she remains close to them and to her brother, Tanner, 20, who briefly dabbled in acting and is now in college. 

Woodley’s grandmother, a practitioner of alternative medicine, provided another kind of perspective: it was she who initiated her granddaughter’s commitment to Mother Earth and health. “She kind of opened my mind to it,” Woodley says. “And then when I was 14, it was a really windy Southern California day, and I looked up and the pine needles were swirling in the air and it was gorgeous. I looked down and there was all this trash swirling around. I was like, ‘Do I want to be a part of that beautiful pine-needle world or this really tragic trash scene on the floor?’” 

However committed Woodley is to saving the world one pine needle at a time, and she is very committed, she realizes that not everyone wants to hear about it. “As much as this industry is a platform for talking about big issues, there’s also so many fuckin’ issues. You could talk about Russia, or Argentina, or fracking, or G.M.O.’s. Maybe the only thing that I’m supposed to do is just show up and be me in every moment. Because I do feel like one of my gifts is to be open and lovely—simple things like smiling at strangers and having kind, small interactions. I think that is what’s going to ultimately shift things.”

It has been a fast ride since The Descendants. There was last year’s Sundance-award-winning hit The Spectacular Now. There was filming the action-packed Divergent, in which Woodley appears in every scene. There was another Sundance Film Festival appearance in January, in Gregg Araki’s dramatic thriller White Bird in a Blizzard, which Magnolia Pictures will release later this year. 

Then there was The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Woodley played Mary Jane Watson (Spiderman’s romantic interest, played by Kirsten Dunst in the first Spider-Man trilogy), but the character was ultimately cut from the sprawling film. “For a few hours it was literally like, ‘Oh, my God, was I awful? Why did they cut me? What are people going to think?’ I woke up the next morning and I was like, ‘O.K., it makes total sense.’ I’m a pretty spiritual person, so I can just sit back and trust that everything happens for a reason, even if my ego doesn’t like it."

She also didn’t have time to obsess about it. During a recent break from filming Insurgent—the second installment of the Divergent series, due out in 2015—she found herself couch-surfing at friends’ homes. “I’ve been in this place in life where I don’t want to own anything,” she says. “I got rid of almost everything except what would fit into a carry-on suitcase.”

The Fault in Our Stars, which took Woodley to Amsterdam (where she had gone backpacking at 18) and to Pittsburgh, is a beautiful modern love story about two teenagers, Hazel and Gus, with a heartbreaking twist. Director Josh Boone says, “I told the studio it’s like Titanic, except the iceberg is cancer.” 

Woodley was so moved by Green’s novel—which has sold seven million copies worldwide and has been translated into 46 languages—that she reached out to the author directly. “She wrote me a long—very long—e-mail before the movie rights even sold,” Green says. “I remember being sort of overwhelmed by it, because it was so long and so positive, and she was so relentless in her certainty that she should play Hazel.”

Woodley also made an unusual impression on the director. “She was such a strange, interesting person,” Boone says of his first encounter with the actress. “She talks about health and is really passionate about what she believes; I wasn’t sure what to make of her.” At her audition the next morning, the director says, “she was the character Hazel. She wasn’t at all the girl I had met the night before, but over the course of getting to know her she is exactly who she is. I had forgotten how idealistic you can be in your 20s. I’m cynical, and she is really inspiring because she is so not.” 

Anybody who has ever come into contact with Shai knows that she is a hugger. A friend honked and stopped as we were coming down the trail, and she leaned into the car and gave him a hug. After our hike she was recognized by a teenage boy skateboarding in the parking lot—she gave him a hug. Before she met me she was at Walt Disney Studios having a meeting, and I’m sure she gave everybody there hugs, too. That’s who she is. I ask John Green, who spent a lot of time with Woodley during the filming of The Fault in Our Stars, if he is concerned about her openness. “I think everyone who cares about her can’t imagine her not being that person,” he says. “But so far she seems to handle it all with great grace.” 

“She has a calmness to her that I would have paid to have at her age and an air of stability,” says her Divergent co-star Kate Winslet. “This is a woman who can cope. She is quietly prepared and uncomplaining. She can navigate rough waters if there are any, and she will come out the other side smiling, hugging everyone, which is genuine, too, by the way. And most importantly, she will be exactly the same girl—acting up a storm, taking risks, and giving the next generation a great new role model to be inspired by.”

As for her male co-stars, Woodley considers herself lucky not to have had to work with any, as she puts it, “dicks.” “You can just really relate to her, and you can see somebody you know in that girl,” says Miles Teller, Woodley’s co-star in both The Spectacular Now and Divergent. “That’s why Shailene’s so good. She’s just like a positive energy force that’s very infectious.” Ansel Elgort, in a role certain to make teenage girls swoon, co-stars as her amputee boyfriend inThe Fault in Our Stars, and he was also, in a tricky hurdle for the producers, her brother in Divergent. Nonetheless, faintly echoing the pairings of the Old Hollywood star system, their chemistry is electric and undeniable. “She’s just so present and there and just real,” Elgort says. “So it’s pretty easy to just work off of her.” 

I ask Woodley, who is single, if she ever would date a fellow actor. “I’m never going to say never. I love acting, but I also really love nature and most actors don’t want to get dirty.” Although Woodley isn’t frequently out and about with other actors her age, she does share a special camaraderie with Teller. “I look at Miles and, like, I’m sort of Julia Roberts in the same way she is to George. Their relationship I could see being our relationship in 20 years, and that is really special."

The last word on Woodley comes from the male co-star who perhaps knows her best. “We’ll be talking about Shailene 40 years from now,” Clooney says. “I’ve never seen anyone so young that has so much together.”