Shailene Woodley

Woodley began acting after accompanying a cousin to a theater class and being noticed by a casting agent. She started appearing in commercials at age five and had taken part in more than 60 television spots before turning 11. Her parents allowed her to work professionally on the condition that she remain grounded, enjoy the experience, and maintain her schoolwork.

She made her screen debut in the television film Replacing Dad in 1999 and subsequently appeared in series including The District, Crossing Jordan, The O.C., Without a Trace, Everybody Loves Raymond, My Name Is Earl, CSI: NY, Close to Home, and Cold Case. She also held roles in television films such as A Place Called Home, Felicity: An American Girl Adventure, and Once Upon a Mattress.

At 15, Woodley was diagnosed with scoliosis and wore a plastic brace extending from her chest to her hips for two years. She attended Simi Valley High School, took Advanced Placement classes, maintained a 4.0 grade-point average, and graduated in 2009.

Woodley landed her first major starring role in 2008 as Amy Juergens in the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Amy is a high-school student whose life changes after an unplanned pregnancy and subsequent motherhood. The series ran for five seasons and 121 episodes, making Woodley widely known among television audiences.

While working on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Woodley was cast as Alexandra "Alex" King, the troubled daughter of George Clooney's character, in Alexander Payne's The Descendants (2011). Her performance received strong critical praise and earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female and received the Trophée Chopard at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.

Woodley received further acclaim for playing Aimee Finecky in The Spectacular Now (2013), opposite Miles Teller. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Woodley and Teller shared the Special Jury Award for Acting. She also starred in Gregg Araki's White Bird in a Blizzard (2014), playing a teenager whose life is disrupted when her mother disappears.

In 2014, Woodley played Hazel Grace Lancaster, a teenager with cancer, in The Fault in Our Stars, an adaptation of John Green's novel. The performance was widely praised, and she received the Hollywood Film Award for Hollywood Breakout Performance, Actress. That same year, she began playing Beatrice "Tris" Prior in the science-fiction film Divergent, followed by Insurgent (2015) and Allegiant (2016). She trained in fighting, firearms, and knife work for the role, and won the MTV Movie Award for Best Female Performance in 2015.

Woodley later played Lindsay Mills opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Oliver Stone's Snowden (2016). She had also been cast as Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but the character was removed from the released film during editing.

After taking an extended break from filming and considering leaving acting, Woodley returned to television in HBO's Big Little Lies. She played Jane Chapman, a single mother with a traumatic past, alongside Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep. Woodley received Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her performance and reprised the role in the second season in 2019.

Woodley starred in and produced Adrift (2018), portraying real-life sailor Tami Oldham Ashcraft. She learned to sail, performed her own stunts, and filmed most of the movie on the open ocean near Fiji. She followed it with the romantic drama Endings, Beginnings and later appeared in The Mauritanian, The Last Letter from Your Lover, The Fallout, To Catch a Killer, Robots, Dumb Money, Ferrari, Three Women, and Killer Heat.

In 2024, Woodley made her Broadway debut in Leslye Headland's family drama Cult of Love, playing Diana Dahl. She also appeared in the PBS documentary series Hope in the Water and was announced as part of the cast of the Hulu limited series Count My Lies.

Woodley and her mother co-founded All It Takes in 2010, a nonprofit organization that provides social-emotional learning programs for young people. She has supported environmental campaigns involving renewable energy, marine conservation, and plastic pollution, and became a Greenpeace Oceans Ambassador in 2019. That year, she joined a three-week expedition to the Sargasso Sea to study the effect of plastics and microplastics on marine life.

In 2016, Woodley protested the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. Her arrest during a Facebook livestream brought national attention to the protest, and she later pleaded guilty to criminal trespass and received a year of probation. She also supported Bernie Sanders's presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 and served on the board of the political organization Our Revolution.

Woodley was engaged to NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers during the early 2020s. The engagement ended in April 2022.