Shailene Woodley Lives For Pleasure

Shailene Woodley doesn’t really do small talk. She is unfailingly polite — to me, to the waitstaff of the restaurant we’re at, to everyone — but pretenses just aren’t her thing. “I’m very uninterested in the performance of people at this moment in life. I’m uninterested in the external value that we put on everything,” the actor tells me, less than 10 minutes into our conversation. “I find the performance of being something else in order to receive love or acceptance or work from others to be the ultimate form of soul death.”

Soul death! Coming from someone whose job is literally performing — and in a famously superficial industry — this perhaps sounds like a crisis of faith. But anyone who’s followed Woodley, from her breakout roles (The Secret Life of the American Teenager) through her YA blockbusters (the Divergent films) to her prestige TV turn (Big Little Lies), knows she’s always marched to her own beat. And now, with Starz’s Three Women, she’s found a project that lets her cut right to the big questions: What are our deepest desires? Why are we the way we are? What’s stopping us from being our truest selves?

The series, premiering Sept. 13, adapts Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling book about three American women navigating sex and intimacy: There’s Lina, whose disinterested husband motivates her to have an affair; Sloane, whose husband likes to watch her have sex with other men; and Maggie, who reconsiders the abuse she experienced by her high school English teacher as he stands trial. With Taddeo on board as the show’s creator, the adaptation stays largely faithful to the source material, though Taddeo herself (lightly fictionalized as “Gia”) is much more of a character in the series. A bushy-haired Woodley plays Gia as a grieving reporter with a self-destructive streak, grappling with her own messy personal life as she speaks to the other women about their relationships.

“She is one of the most emotionally intelligent and emotionally honest people I’ve ever met,” says Taddeo, who found in Woodley not just a professional collaborator but a sounding board for her own relationship dynamics. “We would be having these real-time conversations about stuff happening in my personal life, and it was directly related to things that were happening in the book [and the show]. To be able to have the parallel conversations while doing the parallel work about the subject is really healing.”

Woodley, 32, has done plenty of accounting in her personal life the last few years, too. She began filming Three Women around the time her hyper-scrutinized relationship with NFL quarterback and ex-fiance Aaron Rodgers ended. Today, she describes her disinterest in pretense as the result of “a broken heart.” But she remains undaunted in her search for love, and speaks passionately about her hopes for the future — the kind of partner she wants, her desire to be a mother, and the freedom she feels to find those things on her own timeline. “I give all of myself,” Woodley says. “I used to be a person who, if you crossed me and disrespected that, would continue to give and give. And now you cross me, I respectfully go, ‘Thank you so much for that information. Have a beautiful life. I wish you well.’ Not interested.”

I’m speaking with Woodley at a hotel in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she’s been staying during production on the ‘70s-set revenge flick Motor City. (An avid reader, Woodley’s been juggling a book about Motown and Detroit along with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and a reread of Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June.) Members of her cast and crew stop by to say an enthusiastic hello, all apparently unaffected by the night shoots they’ve been doing. Our phones on the table, both recording audio — mine for journalistic accuracy, hers for personal insurance — are the only hint of guardedness.

Did playing a journalist change her relationship to doing press? “I try to approach things always from a place of positivity, and it’s not always the case,” she says. “Journalists can be really f*cking sneaky. That’s why I record everything now, because I’m like, ‘You say something I didn’t say? I got proof.’ But it’s a weird world because I want to be genuine — and I am — and you never know how that’s going to come across.”

Woodley calls herself a “glutton” for human connection, and Taddeo considers this one of the actor’s most powerful qualities. “When people let down their armor, like snails out of their shells, other snails out of their shells come forward and open to you,” Taddeo says. “What it affords us is the ability to hear from more people, to know more people in deeper ways, not just surface ways.”

Ultimately, Woodley hopes Three Women will accomplish something similar. “Maybe, just maybe,” she says, “it can inspire some other people out there to feel less alone and live a life that feels a little bit more truly pleasurable.”

How early did you get involved in Three Women?

I read the script, and then Zoomed with Lisa Taddeo and Laura Easton, our showrunner. And from the very first conversation, Lisa and I were finishing each other’s thoughts and had a very symbiotic way of seeing the world — feeling the world, perhaps, more than seeing it.

People can use the word soulmate. I use the phrase “cosmic collision.” It’s just true support and true vision. Lisa understands everything I say, not because of intellect but because of heart. That’s very rare, especially for me with a woman, because women can be trapped sometimes with our own projections or our own experiences.

What helped you stop caring so much about performing for others?

Just a broken heart. A broken heart that healed and broke again. I fell in love over and over with unavailability. I’m very open as a human. I love easy and I care easy, but I do not love lightly, and I do not care lightly.

It’s really taken me a lot of time to understand that it’s not on me to fix or heal or do anything about [a relationship] other than protect the deep care and love that I have for the world and for my people. Ultimately, that has helped me walk away without the need to understand why certain things didn’t play out the way that I may have desired them to.

You've been acting since you were so young. Did it take you a while to figure out how to operate in a surface-obsessed industry?

Not really. For better or for worse, I’ve just been who I am. I get called weird a lot. It’s humorous because I actually think I'm very normal and boring. I’m drawn to the simple things in life, like a flower on the street or a smile from anyone. So I’ve never really had to figure out how to navigate it because I just always did me.

The few years in my 20s when I didn’t do me, I look back like, “Jesus Christ, I look insane. I look like a clown.” I have a massive amount of makeup on. [I was trying] to work with different stylists over the years who put me in clothes that I just didn’t relate to at all. Those few years of stumbling through the identity crisis that we all go through in our 20s, but then being inflated by public interface — that was uncomfortable.

Other than that, I left. Throughout my 20s, when I wasn’t working, I was living in Europe, bouncing on and off trains and in and out of hostels, meeting people and couch-surfing and volunteering on farms around the world. I didn’t do it on purpose to escape Hollywood. I did it because it was what fascinated me. I could wash dishes for a while at a B&B in a random farming town in Italy. I could exchange teaching someone English for a place to sleep. It was a really beautiful way of living, and it helped keep me grounded.

Instead of being inquisitive to try and dissect and discover, we pigeonhole and cancel. It’s so destructive.

You’ve said that one of the reasons you connected with Three Women was because you’re interested in the anthropology of sex and intimacy in America.

When I went to Europe and saw women on beaches, naked, and men looking at their faces and not their bodies — the shock of that was overwhelming at 18. The same with meeting some Italian girls and watching them walk around their house in front of their parents in their underwear and no bra and no shirt. I’m going, “How can you do that in front of your dad?” And they’re going, “Shai, that’s so gross. Why would you even think like that? It’s my dad. It’s weird and perverted that you would think there’s something wrong with this.” Whoa. Blew my mind.

And then just seeing friends in America who don’t get to fully be who they are because of sexual desire that’s unfulfilled. Even in the act of sex, there is a bridge to pleasure that has been stolen by the performative quality of what something is supposed to be, or by a lack of feeling safe with a partner, or a lack of feeling safe with ourselves. Life is too short for that. But it is endemic in this country. You add porn and the pressure to be sexualized by the way that we look instead of the way that we smell and feel and the way that we’re breathing together. It’s a confusing time to be a pleasure-seeking individual in the United States of America.

When I read that you were raised by two psychologists, I thought your life would be like, “We grew up with no boundaries.”

I was taught zero boundaries, which turns out is not necessarily the healthiest thing. I’m a big believer in boundaries. Massive believer. Yeah, childhoods are funny. I went through a phase of contending with what I’ve been through. Now I’m in a place where it's like, “Oh God, we’re literally doing the best we can with the tools we have.” I grew up with two parents who loved me, and that’s more than a lot of people could say.

I wake up every day and say, ‘I’m so excited for the magic and miracles that are going to happen today.’

Do you think having a professional life so young affected how you process your childhood?

I’ve always been a little bit of a late bloomer. I’m learning things at 32 that many of my friends learned at 20. In other ways, I feel like I’ve known things since I was born that many of my friends haven’t figured out yet.

I didn’t go through puberty till I was 15 and a half. I played with Barbies. Action figures were my jam. Didn’t have my first kiss until later in high school. But I also had this desire to be taken seriously on a film set. I had this quality that was a bit know-it-all, and it came out of a survival instinct of, “If I know everything, then I’ll be accepted anywhere.” I read a lot. I’ve studied many subjects. I’m kind of a nerd and science freak. I love everything from quantum physics to epigenetics to neuroscience.

Now I ask more questions. But when I was younger, I felt like I had to be the one with the answers [or] the whole world would fall apart. Completely untrue — but the narrative crafted was: Everything is dependent on my ability to be aware, responsible, accountable, knowledgeable, and professional, for family and for career.

I feel like a lot of my friends who are 30 to 35 are like, “This is not where I thought I would be in life.” Do you experience that at all?

I don’t think I ever really had expectations of life. I still don’t. I want to be a mom. My God, I want to cook someone dinner every night and travel the world with them and have pillow talk and celebrate their joys and their purpose and their destinies and have mine also be celebrated. But I don’t have a “that should have happened by now” kind of thing. Maybe the physical discomfort I walked through when I was younger taught me not to have expectations. [Woodley has said she experienced an unspecified health scare in her early 20s.] I wake up every day and I say out loud, “I’m so excited for the magic and miracles that are going to happen today.”

You were talking earlier about how we see the world through these filters that we apply, and a lot of Three Women deals with how the traumas we carry with us inform the decisions we make today. Is there a way to love without trauma?

There motherf*cking has to be. I read a quote yesterday and sent it to a friend earlier: “The finest souls are those who gulped pain and avoided making others taste it,” by Nizar Qabbani. I think that’s how you love without trauma. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t pain, but you’re not making others taste that pain. That’s real commitment.

A lot of actors appreciate social media because you can speak directly to the public. Do you find it to be an effective tool for connection?

I’m just trying to figure it out. I’m like, damn, I do one thing that someone doesn’t understand — not even [disagrees with], doesn’t understand — and there isn’t a question of, “I wonder what she means by that.” It’s an immediate, “Oh, she’s this type of a person,” which is just a dangerous thing that’s happening in general these days. Instead of being inquisitive to try and dissect and discover, we pigeonhole and cancel. Man, it’s so destructive.

Do you feel like you were misunderstood when you shared Melania Trump’s letter about the assassination attempt?

Oh my God. Literally, I read it and I was like, “This is so beautiful.” I was in circles of people that I deeply respect — friends, colleagues, progressive, very intelligent thinkers, shakers and movers — and many of them were saying, “He missed! F*cking assassin missed! Maybe it was a setup. Maybe it was a conspiracy.” I was going, “Have we forgotten that two human lives were taken?” Two people died. That is sad. That is devastating. I could not understand how people were speaking about something with such passion for death.

I only posted the first page of it, because the second page was more political. The first page was very much like, “Look, underneath the political mask is a man, a grandpa, who comes home to his children, his grandchildren, and plays music. The man underneath that mask is my husband.”

I posted that letter because I thought it was a beautiful message of human compassion, and then I forgot about it because I have a life and I don’t live for what social media says. Then a week later, I got a text from a friend that said, “Are you OK?” I Googled my name, because I’m like, “Oh f*ck, what did I say?” And of course, there were all these news articles about Melania Trump, and I was like, “Oh my God, that is now this? Hundreds of articles because I posted about a woman saying she’s grateful her husband is alive? Really?”

It made me shake my head. If [who I am] is not coming through in the way that I’m intending, I’m not going to participate on social media. I participate in my own ways now that maybe are less public because I want to add to the right noise. I don’t want to add to unnecessary noise.

You mean through your activism and nonprofit work?

Yeah. I am on the board of different organizations. It’s sad to me that the minute we say one thing, we are immediately isolated from a large portion of our brothers and sisters in this country. My beliefs are pretty well-known by the things that I have done publicly in the quote-unquote activist world. But until the noise is feeding what I want to feed — which is a world that feels safe and soft and truly inclusive — that [is something to work out] with my people behind closed doors.

I get called weird a lot. It’s humorous because I actually think I’m very normal and boring.

In the past you’ve talked about mentors you have in Hollywood. Who are those people for you right now?

The same people. I have my tight group of angels — people that I look up to and lean on. In 2016, I remember I was a staunch Bernie Sanders fan. Like, my God, I went to dozens of states for that man. And [my The Descendants co-star] George Clooney — we don’t talk often, but when we do, it’s really impactful for me — [was a] staunch Hillary supporter. When we spoke about it together afterwards, there was no judgment or anger at the other because of where we stood. It was only, “Thank God you participated. Thank God you cared. Thank God you tried to do something.”

Going forward, what do you want for your future?

Honestly, I just want to wake up feeling content, and I want to go to sleep content. Between those two moments, I’d like it to feel raw and real and expressive and deep and meaningful and simple and profound. Other than that, I leave a lot of room for magic. I want to be an actor and artist for the rest of my life. I want to create and tell meaningful stories. I want to find a person to do life with, and have a family. And I want to watch the sunset.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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