Shailene Woodley has solidified her image as a heroine and leading lady by starring in critically acclaimed young adult films such as The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, and The Spectacular Now. Before becoming a big Hollywood star working opposite hunks such as Ansel Elgort, Woodley began her career on television, landing her big break on the 2008 ABC series The Secret Life of the American Teenager.
It’s easy to imagine that Woodley would continue to look back at her Secret Life days with fondness. It is, after all, the show that arguably launched her career. Turns out that although the show initially resonated with her, the young starlet became disenchanted, even going so far as to say she was “stuck” with the show for six years. Shailene Woodley is nothing like her character on Secret Life. Here’s why she didn’t enjoy playing the role.
Woodley Didn’t Agree With The Show’s Anti-Sex Message
Secret Life centers around the optimistic and ambitious 15-year-old Amy (Shailene Woodley) who, after having a one-night stand with the school’s resident bad boy, becomes pregnant. At first the message resonated with Woodley, who knew friends in the same predicament as the show’s leading lady.
“Those episodes all hit home,” says Woodley in an interview with Bustle, referring to her experience reading three episodes of the show. “I had friends in high school who were pregnant. It felt like everything that I wanted to be sending into the world.”
However, Woodley’s first impression was based on only three episodes, yet she signed a contract that locked her in for six years.
As the show progressed into a cautionary tale against sex before marriage, preaching the virtues of abstinence by showing characters wearing promise rings, vowing to save themselves for marriage, and shaming those who engaged in premarital sex, Woodley began to disagree with the show’s message, explaining to Bustle that it didn’t align with her own beliefs.
“There were a lot of things that were written into the scripts that not just me, but a lot of the cast, disagreed with,” Woodley says. “There were belief systems that were pushed that were different than my own.”
Of course, Woodley couldn’t simply leave. She signed a contract for six years.
“Yet legally I was stuck there. To this day it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”
In Fact, Woodley Loves Sex
Unlike the message the show promotes, Woodley loves sex, calling it the “most underrated, underappreciated, and undervalued experiences that we have” in the same interview with Bustle. This is indeed unlike Amy in Secret Life, who vows never to have sex again after giving birth to her baby.
Yet both women, Woodley and her TV character Amy, share one experience: trauma. While Amy experienced the trauma of teen pregnancy and childbirth on a backdrop of typical high school drama, Woodley experienced a relationship with sex that she describes as unhealthy. Unlike her TV character, Woodley goes on to appreciate sex, which she credits to one mystery man:
“I had a lover that taught me a lot about my own body and my own emotional connection to sex,” she says in the Bustle interview. “That’s when I feel like I healed my relationship with sexuality — when this beautiful man came into my life and helped me walk through that journey.”
Unlike Her TV Character, Woodley Isn’t Monogamous
Although Amy is caught in a love triangle between bad boy Ricky Underwood (her baby’s father) and boy-next-door Ben Boykewich, the show’s message is clear: Save yourself for marriage; save yourself for one person. But Woodley doesn’t believe in sex only after marriage. In fact, she doesn’t believe that monogamy is the only right way to have a relationship. In an interview with the New York Times, Woodley reveals that she has not been so monogamous in the past:
“I’m someone who has experienced both an open relationship and a deeply monogamous relationship in my life, and I think we’re in a day and age where there should be no rules except for the ones designed by two people in a partnership — or three people, whatever floats your boat!”
Those are certainly words her character, Amy, would never utter.
What does Woodley value in a relationship, monogamous or otherwise? According to the same New York Times interview, trust and communication:
“There has to be a level of responsibility in any relationship dynamic, and that responsibility is simply honesty and communication and trust. Apart from that, it’s really none of our business what people choose to do with their lives.”
She Doesn’t Believe In An “End-All, Be-All,” Either
Unlike Secret Life, which promotes a monogamous sex-free relationship ending in marriage, Woodley doesn’t believe one person is an “end-all, be-all”:
“We’re societally conditioned to assume that one person can be our end-all, be-all. This is a concept I’ve been thinking about often right now, because I’m very much single, and I’ve chosen to be single for a while. The idea of being with someone … is it only because you’ve fallen in love with that person, or because there’s a newness to understanding yourself because of what that person can offer you?”
This she says in the same interview with Bustle.
Shailene Woodley is certainly nothing like her Secret Life TV character, Amy, so it’s no surprise that the show’s message conflicted with her own beliefs. Although working on the show for six long years was difficult for the young star, one good thing came out of her experience:
“Being on Secret Life propelled me to be more vocal about my own belief systems.”
Through the show Woodley discovered and solidified her identity.