SPOTLIGHT June, 2014: Shailene Woodley, Actress, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS
This month, AWFJ’s Spotlight focuses on Shailene Woodley, the versatile young actress who followed her commanding turn in Divergent with a bravely tender performance in The Fault in Our Stars. Woodley’s adored by teenage girls for whom she provides a strikingly appealing and positive role model. Read on…
Teenage girls at the Crosby Hotel in New York are all giggly and excited. In a few minutes they’ll see Shailene Woodley who is promoting The Fault in Our Stars with a press conference to be live streamed on Yahoo and Tumblr. They’ll get a glimpse at the star that The Hollywood Reporter touts as the next “maybe-be Jennifer Lawrence.”
The girls are here because they love this movie that’s based on the eponymous YA bestseller about a cancer stricken teenager. Despite the difficult topic this is favorite among young women who love the love story in the book. The girls have their iPhones poised to capture an OMG-look-at-me-I-am-With-Insert-Name-facebook moment.
When Woodley enters in her flip-flops, she shows no signs of being Hollywood’s next IT GIRL, the title she captured when moviegoers fell in love with her as George Clooney’s daughter in The
Descendants.
Hollywood took notice, too, even when she chose to next work on an Indie film, The Spectacular Now, which hit big.
(And here’s a note to serious Shailene fans: we know you’s already discovered her as Amy on ABC Family’s Secret Life).
Then she entered the YA franchise realm with Divergent (signing on for the sequels. too) and comparisons to JLaw were inevitable: she has box office bankability (Divergent earned $148-million domestically and $266-million internationally), she is a media darling and has received numerous awards (the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for The Decendants, among others).
It might take some time before her reach extends beyond the already adoring YA crowd and she makes the leap, as Lawrence has done, into that exclusive category of being that extremely talented young actress you must have in your next movie (although we’re pretty sure David O. Russell and Woody Allen have already taken note!).
Shailene’s IMDb profile shows that she’s done five movies and a TV show in a little over a year and a half. Wow, that’s a Spotlight accomplishment. And the demand for her talents continues to mount.
Woodley’s not a newcomer to the biz. She was the delicate age of five when she, with the support of her parents, began auditioning for TV shows and movies. She certainly had the talent to prevail! She landed numerous TV spots (Hertz and Leapfrog, among them), lots of small roles in movies and TV, and several regular characters in TV series. It’s no secret that Secret Life gave her teen fan favorite status.
When The Fault In Our Stars opens on June 6, her commanding performance as a teenager with stage four cancer will make movie audiences of all ages weep. Hazel, who believes her disease will deprive her from experiencing the joys of life, reluctantly falls in love with a young hot guy Gus (played by her Divergent co-star Ansel Elgort). Shailene, who is simply stunning in the film, says “I wanted the role so badly I sent (author) John Green a long, long email about how much I loved the book, and how I had to play Hazel. So I sat down with the studio executives and producers and said ‘I’ll be a P.A. or an extra, just please, please let me be part of it.’”
But don’t think The Fault In The Stars is the only thing that’s making Woodley hot at the moment. At Sundance, Woodley showed her indie movie White Bird in a Blizzard and caused a big stir for some nude sex scenes with Thomas Jane. And, right now she’s shooting the hotly anticipated Insurgent sequel. And, the scifi movie Allegiant (part 1 and 2) is also in the pipeline.
Why We Chose her:
She has talent as an actress and the down-to-earth attitude that last longer in Hollywood than a shooting star!
The Fault in Our Stars opens June 6, 2014
