INDIEWIRE – It’s been a year since Shailene Woodley netted an Independent Spirit Award and a Golden Globe nomination for her feisty breakthrough turn opposite George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants.” Since then, the 21-year-old has been finishing up her run on the ABC teen show “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” (the last episodes air this spring) and laying low on the film front. She’s finally back on the big screen in “The Spectacular Now,” a deeply affecting coming-of-age film that earned a rapturous response at its world premiere on the second day of the Sundance Film Festival Friday. (The film was recently acquired by A24 and is expected to open this summer.)
In the drama, helmed by “Smashed” co-writer-director James Ponsoldt, Woodley proves that “Descendants” was no fluke by showing great range as Aimee, a deft high school student with a bright future ahead who falls for the troubled class clown (a revelatory Miles Teller).
Indiewire sat down with Woodley in Park City to discuss her absence from the film circuit, shooting her first sex scene and taking over from Kirsten Dunst to play Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” directed by “(500) Days of Summer” helmer Mark Webb.
You were visibly choked up on stage following the first screening at the Library. What was going through your mind?
A) It was the first Q&A I’ve done in about a year, so that was a little nerve-racking. And B) I’ve never had a film in Sundance. I come here every year just to watch films. And I think that the crowd that’s attracted to this festival is really outstanding and obviously loves film, so it’s always nerve-racking to present a film to a crowd that knows what they’re talking about and knows their stuff.Were some of your emotions tied to your own reaction to the film?
I mean, I’d seen a rough cut but I’d never seen the full thing before. I was still trying to process what I had just seen, and process whether I thought it was a good film.So what’s your verdict then, now that you’ve had a night to sleep on it?
I’m very, very proud of it. I think it’s really exciting and different and beautiful. There aren’t a lot of films about adolescents or quote-unquote coming-of-age films that are realistic nowadays. This is a really truthful birds’-eye look at what it’s like to be in high school right now.In many ways the film is the antithesis to shows like “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.”
“Secret Life” and “Spectacular Now” couldn’t be any more different. “Secret Life” wasn’t realistic at all. I think the themes at the core had a lot of truth to them, but the way in which they were presented was not realistic or truthful. Like I said, “Spectacular Now” was a really human piece. We got to explore and really get inside these kids’ minds. I love that they weren’t dumbed down. Teenagers are extremely smart!Continue readingShailene Woodley on First Sex, Teen Drinking and ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’
Category: Interviews
MTV – We’ve hardly heard a peep from “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” star Shailene Woodley since she was cast as heroine Beatrice “Tris” Prior in the big-screen adaptation of dystopian thriller “Divergent.” Well, not anymore, seeing as we caught up with the star today at the Sundance Film Festival, where she was promoting her movie “The Spectacular Now.”
So, first things first: What inspired Shailene to sign on for the role of the Dauntless factioner? We guarantee her answer is nothing you’d expect.
“I read the book, and I thought it was really—my whole thing, to be honest, is I never wanted to do big films,” she explained. “I’ve been acting for 16 years, and it was never something that I wanted to do, to be in a big blockbuster film, especially one that was similar to ‘Hunger Games’ or ‘Twilight.’ You know, one that had a huge pre-existing fan base and one that would carry on for multiple years.”
But that all changed once she cracked the spine on Veronica Roth’s young-adult novel.
“After I read the book, I was really profoundly moved, and it’s really metaphorical for things that are going on today, specifically things that I’m passionate about and things that I want to make public and things that I want to educate people on,” Shailene said. “So I think it’s a really great platform, not only artistically but also from a human level just to expose these kind of messy, nasty things that are going on in our country.”
What types of things, specifically?
“In ‘Divergent,’ people are injected with this serum and then controlled by it, and I think that it’s really funny that right now we’re starting to chip our dogs and chip our babies,” she said. “That’s just a small example. I could go on for hours. There’s also mind control that kind of gets dealt with in ‘Divergent.’ That’s going on today and nobody knows about that.”
“Divergent” is slated to hit theaters March 21, 2014.
