Shailene Woodley

Shailene Diann Woodley (born November 15, 1991) is an American actress. She first gained prominence for her starring role as Amy Juergens in the ABC Family teen drama series The Secret Life of the American Teenager (2008–2013). She then starred in the films The Descendants (2011) and The Spectacular Now (2013), receiving her first Golden Globe Award nomination for the former.

Woodley achieved wider recognition for her starring role as a teenaged cancer patient in the romantic drama The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and as Beatrice Prior in the science-fiction trilogy The Divergent Series (2014–2016). She played a sexual assault survivor in the HBO drama series Big Little Lies (2017–2019), for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. She has since acted in films such as Snowden (2016), Adrift (2018), The Mauritanian (2021), Ferrari (2023), and To Catch a Killer (2023), the last of which she also served as a producer.

On stage, she made her Broadway debut acting in Leslye Headland's family dramedy play Cult of Love (2024), for which she was honored with a Theater World Award. She is also an environmental activist and a Greenpeace Oceans Ambassador, and serves on a number of boards dedicated to environmental causes. She is co-founder of the nonprofit organization All it Takes, which focuses on youth development.

Woodley was born in San Bernardino, California. Her mother, Lori, is a middle-school counselor and her father, Lonnie, is a former school principal and a family therapist. Shailene has a younger brother, Tanner. Her parents separated when she was 14. Woodley has a diverse ethnic background, with British ancestry on her father's side and a maternal heritage that includes African-American and Creole roots, as well as French, Spanish, Swiss, and German ancestry.

Woodley was discovered by an agent while she was taking a local theater class, which was part of a $700 program she begged her parents to enroll her in after accompanying her cousin to a theater class in her hometown. At the age of five, she began working in commercials, including advertisements for Leapfrog, Hertz, and a Honda minivan, appearing in more than sixty TV spots before she turned eleven years old. She told The Hollywood Reporter that her parents only agreed to allow her to work professionally if she promised to adhere to three rules: "I had to stay the person they knew I was; have fun; and do good in school". Woodley was a 4.0 student, who took AP classes and graduated from Simi Valley High School.

She considered studying Interior Design at New York University (NYU) but her acting career became more demanding as she signed on to star in The Secret Life of the American Teenager. During a hiatus from her TV show, Woodley took a job at American Apparel in New York City. Two days into the new job, she got a call to meet with director Alexander Payne and after two months, she had to quit the job after joining the film The Descendants. She also took acting classes from Anthony Meindl.

At fifteen, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and was put in a chest-to-hips plastic brace for two years. Woodley told Us Weekly that "It's like wearing a tacky, disgusting, plastic corset for 18 hours a day. In the beginning, it was hard to eat or breathe. And I had to give up cross-country running. But I needed to have it to realign my spine". Her condition did not affect her work on set as she "would [just] take the brace off during filming and put it back on during breaks".

Woodley began her acting career in 1999 with a minor role in the television film Replacing Dad. She went on to feature in minor television roles in The District and Crossing Jordan (in the latter, she portrayed the 10-year-old version of Jill Hennessy's title character). Next she had a leading role in the television film A Place Called Home (2004) as California Ford, which earned her a nomination for a Young Artist Award for Best Leading Young Actress in a TV Movie, Miniseries or Special. She also originally played the young Kaitlin Cooper in The O.C. She appeared as the titular character Felicity Merriman in the television film Felicity: An American Girl Adventure (2005). Her performance received another Young Artist Award nomination, this time for Best Performance in a TV Movie, Miniseries, or Special (Comedy or Drama). Following this, Woodley appeared in numerous guest roles in other television series, including Everybody Loves Raymond, My Name Is Earl, CSI: NY, Close to Home, and Cold Case.