Fresh off of her five-year run on ABC Family’s The Secret Life of an American Teenager, Shailene Woodley is staged to take on bigger and better things. She has already starred in Indie flick The Spectacular Now, has filmed White Bird in a Blizzard and is working on the first movie in a dystopian trilogy, Divergent.
She recently sat down with Emma Stone, her would-be co-star from The Amazing Spider-Man, for Interview.
Among other subjects, Shailene mentioned she was grateful for the opportunities that Secret Life provided her but was conflicted by the show’s end.
“Sometimes, morally, I questioned what I would have to say on the show,” Shailene admitted. “It got to the point where I felt like there was kind of a conflict in terms of what I was preaching to the world and what I actually believed as a human, which was rough.”
Shailene said she initially related to her character, Amy Jurgens, in that she also had a “cooler” high school boyfriend. However, by the end of the show, she felt less attached to the role.
“The very first script led me to believe that it was going to be a show about truthful, really hard things that happen in high school that would be dealt with in a very authentic way,” Shailene said. “It was a show that I was extremely passionate about in the beginning, and it’s not that I lost passion for it, but I just didn’t connect to the storyline toward the end.”
To Shailene’s credit, she stuck with the show through its end earlier this summer. She now believes that was a positive learning experience for her as an actress.
“What I found with Secret Life was that it was hard to talk about some of the issues because I didn’t believe in them, and on a personal level, I was not in agreement with the things that we were preaching. But I think that with anything you do in life that requires a commitment, you have to make sure you’re fully passionate about it and go in with full integrity — and even at the end, if you’re not as passionate about it, you still recognize the commitment that you made and you stick to it.”
Writer’s note Upon review, the original version of this story was too strongly and too awkwardly phrased. It was intended to poke a bit of fun. But, as readers noted, it came across as disjointed and mean… That was totally not my intention. I apologize to anyone who was offended.
