Shailene Woodley Nearly Missed out on a Major Film Role Due to Being Arrested for Her Activism
Shailene Woodley was famously arrested for advocacy towards environmentalism in 2018. Her very brief experience in handcuffs posed little threat to her career. However, the inconvenience did postpone Woodley getting a major film role.
Shailene Woodley was famously arrested for protesting at ‘Standing Rock’
Woodley has always been very passionate about protecting the Earth. Her status as an actor has definitely helped her crusade for a much greener planet. Still, she confided that even if she wasn’t a celebrity, it wouldn’t affect her activism one bit.
“It’s not that I want to use my platform to do it — I’d be doing it even if there was one person following me or if I didn’t have a platform,” she once told Green Matters.
She asserted that she had more than one reason behind her mission.
“What makes me want to do it is [that] I want to have kids. And I just can’t justify bringing them into a world where I’m not fighting every single day to make direct change for future generations. So that’s my driver,” Woodley said. “My driver is also — we are nature ourselves, human beings, and we kind of easily lose sight of that. We call it ‘social injustice’ or ‘environmental injustice,’ but it really comes down to our human condition of emotional imbalance, and that’s my drive for direct change.”
Woodley’s desire to help change the world led her to Standing Rock, which was a reservation in North Dakota. The Descendants star was protesting alongside several others about a pipeline built on top of Native American soil. She was arrested for her efforts, and had to spend a bit of time in jail.
“When you’re in a jail cell and they shut that door, you realise no one can save you. If there’s a fire and they decide not to open the door, you’ll die. You are a caged animal,” she once told Marie Claire.
Around this time, she was sent an offer for the film Adrift. The 2018 movie saw Woodley playing a young woman stranded at sea alongside her partner. But the offer couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Fortunately, Woodley was soon able to nab the film in time.
“I originally missed their email in my inbox because it was while I was at Standing Rock. Ultimately, when I did read it, I fell in love with the story because it is so rare that you get the opportunity to explore a survival story and love story at the same time,” she told Harper’s Bazaar.
How Shailene Woodley feels about being called a Hollywood Hippy
Because of Woodley’s strong passion towards the environment, and her actions to preserve it, some have labeled the actor a hippy. She admitted that the label did bother her somewhat, but she soon came to embrace the title.
“I mean, I used to get offended by that. But now I’m just like, ‘Great, you want to call me a hippy? So many things about the hippy movement were f***ing beautiful, I’m all about it,’” she once told The Guardian.
The Big Little Lies actor also noticed the irony with how acceptable it’s become to talk about the environment nowadays in mainstream media.
“When I was talking about these things 10 or 15 years ago, it was before people knew what environmentalism was. The most environmental thing you could do then was recycle,” Woodley said. “There wasn’t a lot of narrative around these things. So of course you’re going to be ostracised in some way, be labelled as ‘other’, because it’s not mainstream. Now? Every single f***ing influencer or model or CEO is talking about this! Look, I don’t take offence at being called ‘The Hippy of Hollywood’ if it means one or two people are going to learn some things.”
