Shailene Woodley opens up about health struggles that caused her to miss out on a lot of projects.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Shailene shared that she’s had to say no to a lot of projects after working on the Divergent franchise.
“I haven’t spoken much about this yet publicly, and I will one day, but I was very, very sick in my early 20s. While I was doing the Divergent movies and working hard, I also was struggling with a deeply personal, very scary physical situation,” Shailene says.
“Because of that, I said no to a lot of opportunities because I needed to get better, and those jobs ended up going to peers of mine who I love. They went on to a lot of success,” she adds.
Although she doesn’t detail what health struggles she went through at the time, she reveals that it was serious enough for her to prioritize her health over her career – it came to a point where she was wondering, “‘Am I going to survive what I’m going through right now and ever be healthy, or even have the opportunity to work on projects I’m passionate about again because of the situation I’m in?'”
“I was in a place where I had no choice but to just surrender and let go of my career, and it brought out this negative voice in my mind that kept spinning for years and years afterward,” she recounts.
Thankfully, she was able to overcome it.
“Now I’m on the other side of it, thank god. A lot of the last few years has been about focusing on mental health for me, and it’s a slow process. But because of that work, I feel very grounded and rooted in who I am and very clear about everything in my life, whether it’s my career or my relationships or my own internal worth,” Shailene says. “I feel very grateful to have walked that line of fire, because now I know what I don’t want to ever go back to.”
She shares that it came to a point where almost stopped working – her agents didn’t “send me anything for almost a year.”
“There was a point in my life, right before Big Little Lies, where I had hit a wall with acting,” she said.
She actually almost passed on Big little Lies. When she found out that Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern had signed on, “I read it, fell in love with it, and Laura, who I had worked with on The Fault in Our Stars, called me and that was really the push,” she revealed.
