Shailene Woodley

Shailene Woodley (born November 15, 1991, San Bernadino, California, U.S.) is an American actress who first received recognition for her authentic, emotionally rich portrayals of teenaged characters in the ABC Family television series The Secret Life of the American Teenager (2008–13) and Alexander Payne’s film The Descendants (2011). Her notable later roles include starring as the heroine of the Divergent trilogy (2014–16) and being part of the ensemble cast of the series Big Little Lies (2017–19). In addition, Woodley is an activist for environmental and political causes.

Upbringing and early roles as a child actor

Woodley is the daughter of Lonnie Woodley, a former school principal, and Lori Woodley (née Victor), a psychologist and former school counselor. Shailene Woodley grew up in Simi Valley, California, a small city about an hour’s drive northwest of Los Angeles, with her younger brother, Tanner, and she lived with her mother after her parents split up when she was 14 years old.

Woodley developed an interest in acting at the age of five when she accompanied a cousin to a theater class and soon began taking classes herself. After she was noticed by a casting agent, she began steadily booking appearances in commercials, and by her early teens she had done dozens of television spots for brands such as Honda and Hertz, a car rental company. Woodley told Vera magazine in 2024 that—unlike other child actors who are driven by their hard-charging stage parents—she was the driving force behind her young career and that her parents agreed to keep bringing her to auditions only if she could “stay the person they knew [she] was, do well in school and have fun.”

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Apart from commercials, Woodley also won acting roles in several television series and movies. She had her first speaking part in the television movie Replacing Dad (1999). She then appeared in episodes of several series, including Without a Trace (2003), Everybody Loves Raymond (2004), and CSI: New York (2007), and had recurring roles in The District (2001–03), The O.C. (2003–04), and Crossing Jordan (2001–04). During this time, she also made several more television movies, including A Place Called Home (2004), Felicity: An American Girl Adventure (2005), and Once Upon a Mattress (2005).

Career breakthroughs: The Secret Life of the American Teenager and The Descendants

In 2008, when she was a junior in high school, Woodley landed her first starring role, as Amy Juergens, an ambitious 15-year-old student whose life is upended by an unplanned pregnancy and subsequent motherhood, in The Secret Life of the American Teenager. The show went on to air for five seasons. As her star rose in the entertainment industry, Woodley strove to maintain a relatively normal personal life, and she had a 4.0 grade point average and sang in her school choir before graduating high school in 2009.

During the time she was filming Secret Life, Woodley took on several film roles that introduced her to an even wider audience. In 2011 she had a breakthrough appearance in the film The Descendants as a teenager who struggles to keep her family together after a tragic accident leaves her mother in a coma. Critic A.O. Scott gave Woodley a rave review in The New York Times, writing that her performance was “one of the toughest, smartest, most credible adolescent performances in recent memory.” In addition, Woodley won a 2012 Independent Spirit Award for best supporting actress for the role and was also nominated for a Golden Globe.

Film roles in the 2010s: The Spectacular Now and the Divergent trilogy

1 of 2

2 of 2

Woodley garnered further acclaim for her winning, naturalistic turns as Aimee Finicky, a quiet, studious high-school senior attracted to a wilder classmate (played by Miles Teller) in the romantic drama The Spectacular Now (2013) and as Hazel Grace Lancaster, a young cancer patient, in The Fault in Our Stars (2014), based on the best-selling young adult novel by John Green. She then moved into bigger-budget fare as the heroine Tris Prior in three films in the science-fiction adventure Divergent franchise, Divergent (2014), Insurgent (2015), and Allegiant (2016). The trilogy, based on books by Veronica Roth, got generally middling reviews, but Woodley was often singled out for praise, with The Guardian calling her “the series’s strongest asset” and Manohla Dargis of The New York Times citing Woodley’s “talent for carving out a little pocket of intimacy on-screen.”

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

Later roles: Big Little Lies

In 2017 Woodley returned to television in the award-winning HBO series Big Little Lies (2017–19), in which she played Jane Chapman, a single mother with a dark past. The series was adapted from Liane Moriarty’s murder mystery novel of the same name and features an ensemble cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, and Meryl Streep. In 2017 Woodley was nominated for the Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actress in a limited series or movie for the role. Between filming the two seasons, Woodley starred in the biographical film Adrift (2018), about a couple sailing through a catastrophic hurricane, and costarred in the romantic drama Endings, Beginnings (2019).

Woodley has continued to appear in films, including as a legal assistant helping to free a detainee at Guantánamo Bay detention camp in The Mauritanian (2021), as the mistress of Enzo Ferrari in Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023), and as the wife of a meme stock investor in Dumb Money (2023). Also in 2023 Woodley portrayed a journalist writing a book about female sexuality in the limited series Three Women, based on a bestseller of the same name by Lisa Taddeo. Woodley later guest starred in the second season (2026) of Paradise, a postapocalyptic thriller; she earned an Emmy Award for her performance.

Activism and personal life

Woodley developed an interest in environmentalism in high school after reading about the corporate ownership of the U.S. food system. In 2016 she attended the Standing Rock protests against development of an oil pipeline and was arrested and charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass and engaging in a riot. She later was the executive producer of Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock (2017), a documentary about the protests. Also in 2016 Woodley was a vocal supporter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign seeking the Democratic nomination for president. In 2019 she was named a Greenpeace Oceans Ambassador, and the following year she again campaigned for Sanders’s presidential bid. In 2024 Woodley appeared in the PBS documentary series Hope in the Water in a segment about harvesting giant purple sea urchins in order to save kelp forests and support local fisheries.

In 2010 Woodley and her mother founded a nonprofit, All It Takes, which provides social-emotional learning programs and pedagogical materials for young people.

In the early 2020s Woodley was engaged to NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers. The engagement was called off in April 2022.