Shailene Woodley is a passionate and determined actress who started her working career at an incredibly young age.
Woodley may be best known for her lead role in the Divergent series of movies, which were based on the series of books by Veronica Roth.
However, Woodley was a model well before making any appearances on television or in film.
Her continuing career has managed to earn her an impressive net worth for someone who has just turned 30 years old.
What Is Shailene Woodley’s Net Worth?
Shailene Woodley has a net worth of $12 million and earns a minimum of $40,000 for each television episode she appears in.
Although Woodley earns most of her money in the entertainment business, her first job was modeling in 1995 at the early age of four years old.
Woodley and her younger brother, Tanner Woodley, grew up in Upland, California.
Both of her parents worked in the education system, with her mother working as a school counselor and her father working as the principal.
Despite Woodley’s parents’ divorce, she believes that she had an excellent childhood, and her parents gave her and her brother all the support they needed to thrive.
When Woodley was just five years old, her parents began having her audition for commercials and television shows.
Acting was a dream that Woodley always had, and her parents were glad to help her achieve those dreams.
By 1999, Shailene Woodley was appearing all over television, thanks to her incredible acting talent that developed at such a young age.
The show that made people remember her name was The Secret Life of an American Teenager.
As her fame began to reach a new peak, Woodley discovered that she had scoliosis.
The fame and recognition that she had earned with her hit show helped her land her first film role in The Descendants, featuring George Clooney.
Clooney was impressed by Woodley’s professionalism and dedication to her career, even admitting that Woodley had a long and bright future ahead of her.
When her popularity didn’t seem like it could rise any higher, she starred in popular youth novelist, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.
Woodley played the lead role of Hazel, who is a young teenager battling cancer.
She later went on to play Tris in the Divergent series.
Starting As A Child Actress
The first role that Shailene Woodley got was as a little girl in Replacing Dad, a show about a mother with a husband who cheated on her with her daughter’s young teacher.
Although it wasn’t a large role, it was enough to get her foot in the door.
From 2001 to 2003, Woodley played Kristen Debreno in The District.
You can spot young Woodley in the episodes Cop Hunt, Explicit Activities, and Last Waltz.
Woodley would continue her trend of taking on serious roles in Without a Trace as the younger version of the character Clare Metcalf.
The first role to break this gloomy trend was her role as one of the snotty girls in the Everyone Loves Raymond episode Party Dress, where Raymond has to go dress shopping with his daughter.
While Woodley had only gotten smaller roles up to this point, but this changed in 2003 when she was given the role of Kaitlyn Cooper in The O.C.
Shailene Woodley was in the first episode of the show and also appeared in The Model Home, The Debut, The Perfect Couple, The Goodbye Girl, and The Ties That Bind.
During her time on The O.C., Woodley was also playing the younger version of the main character in Crossing Jordan from 2001 until 2004.
As soon as she finished her time with Crossing Jordan, she jumped into Jack & Bobby as Chloe Benedict for two episodes.
Woodley returned to the world of cop shows with her roles in Cold Case and Close to Home.
She played Gaby Tursi in Close to Home in 2007 and then played Sarah Gunden in Cold Case in the same year.
Shailene Woodley had also been in a slew of made-for-television movies such as A Place Called Home, Felicity: An American Girl Adventure, and Final Approach.
Her Big Break
In 2008, Shailene Woodley took on the role of Amy Juergens in The Secret Life of an American Teenager, a teenager who discovered she was pregnant after returning from band camp.
The show was incredibly popular with the audience, especially at the beginning.
When Woodley first signed onto the show, she was incredibly excited to be discussing the taboo subject of teenage pregnancy in the late 2000s.
The ABC Family show was so popular that it lasted for five years and had 121 episodes.
During the late 2000s, catching the latest episode of The Secret Life of an American Teenager was necessary if you wanted to know what everyone was talking about at the lunch table the next day.
While the show was loved by both cast and audiences at first, the cast members’ opinions changed as the narrative of the show began to take a turn.
Shailene Woodley had originally taken the role because she wanted to highlight how difficult it was to be a teenage mother after watching some of her high school friends become mothers at an extremely young age.
As the seasons went on, her character’s story went from one that highlights the struggles of a teenage mother to a cautionary tale for teenage girls across the country.
Woodley wasn’t pleased with the message that it sent, which led her to be more cautious about the roles she chose to portray.
The whole cast understood the level of popularity that their show had with the youth at the time, so they organized a reunion in 2020.
During the reunion, the cast discussed why they’d like a reboot of the show.
However, they believe the topic should change from teenage pregnancy to the mental health damage caused by social media or gun violence in schools.
Landing On The Silver Screen
The first movie for the silver screen that Shailene Woodley ever appeared in was the 2007 comedy Moola.
While this movie didn’t do much for her reputation, it prepared her for the movie that brought her to the attention of more movie casting directors.
In 2011, Shailene Woodley starred in The Descendants alongside George Clooney.
Woodley played the troubled daughter of a wealthy land baron whose mother is in a coma after a tragic boating accident.
Woodley was able to get ahold of the script before George Clooney and fell in love with the realistic, hectic nature of the movie.
Because of her experience with The Secret Life of an American Teenager, Woodley wanted something where she could be authentic about the way her character felt or the lines she was able to deliver.
Shailene Woodley is closely related to the angsty, scared, and confused Alexandra King.
Just a few years earlier, Woodley had gone through a similar phase of feeling like the world was against her.
She claimed that the script was so well written that the movie was generally easy for her to be a part of.
Two years after The Descendants, Shailene Woodley took on the role of the lead love interest in The Spectacular Now.
The romantic comedy was a new kind of role for Woodley, but fans loved the new direction for the young actress.
The following year, Woodley took on the lead role in White Bird in a Blizzard, which followed the story of a young girl named Kat Connors whose mother goes missing in 1988.
Woodley was joined by Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, and Angela Bassett.
Despite all the success that she had found, Woodley’s acting career was only getting started.
The year 2014 quickly became one of the busiest in her entire career.
How The Divergent Series Changed Her Career
In 2014, Shailene Woodley took on the role of the beloved character, Beatrice “Tris” Prior from the youth science-fiction novel series Divergent.
Similar to the Hunger Games series, young readers and movie production companies were enthralled with young heroines taking on entire societies.
While the books were an undeniable hit among teenage readers, the movies weren’t seen as successful or moving as the books.
Many critics complained that there were too many plot devices that didn’t make sense and the movie mimicked Hunger Games too closely.
For the first Divergent movie, Shailene Woodley was able to make $250,000 to $500,000.
Some people believe that she should have made more, considering that Jennifer Lawrence made $500,000 in The Hunger Games and would get bonuses based on the performance of the film.
A year after Divergent was released, The Divergent Series: Insurgent was released.
During the filming of Insurgent, Woodley was also starring in John Green’s youth novel film adaptation, Fault in Our Stars.
Her hair was cut short for her other movie, so the director of Insurgent asked Woodley to wear a wig.
Woodley told the director that she was concerned about the wig looking unrealistic and shifting too much on her head during high-action scenes.
People loved the pixie cut that her character wore instead of the shoulder-length hair that the character had in the books.
The final movie that was released for the Divergent series was Allegiant, which came out in 2016.
Although there was a fourth movie in the series, Shailene Woodley dropped out of the series.
The movie did incredibly well at the box office, making $288.9 million, $297.3 million, and $179.2 million respectively.
Shailene Woodley’s health became a major concern and Woodley almost quit acting altogether.
Becoming An Award-Winning Actress
While Woodley has been receiving nominations and special awards since 2004, her work in The Descendants with George Clooney was her earliest piece of properly recognized work.
The movie got more than 30 different nominations for her performance alone.
Woodley won the award for Best Supporting Actress from the Central Ohio Film Critics Association, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards, the Denver Film Critics Society, the Florida Film Critics Circle Awards, the National Board of Review, the San Diego Film Critics Society Awards, and the St. Louis Film Critics Association.
For The Descendants, Woodley was given awards for Best Young Actress, Breakthrough Performance, and Best Supporting Female.
In 2013, she earned Best Supporting Actress from the San Diego Film Critics Society Awards and Special Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival.
Divergent helped Woodley become recognized by the People’s Choice Awards for Favorite Movie Duo, which she shares with Theo James.
The movie also won the Teen Choice Award for the Choice Action Movie Actress.
In the same year as Divergent, Woodley had released her hit drama The Fault in Our Stars.
At the Hollywood Film Awards, she was given the award for Best Breakthrough Performance of an Actress.
The MTV Movie Awards gave her performance as Hazel the award for Best Female Performance.
She won two Teen Choice Awards for The Fault in Our Stars, including Choice Drama Movie Actress and Choice Movie Chemistry, which she shares with Nat Wolff and Ansel Elgort.
Insurgent also earned her a Teen Choice Award for Best Action Movie Actress.
Woodley has also earned an array of special awards.
In 2011, she earned her first Spotlight Award at the Hollywood Film Awards.
She has earned the Trophée Chopard at the Cannes Film Festival and Virtuoso Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
Starting Her Own Organization
Shailene Woodley has always been extremely open about her love of nature, which she inherited from her mother, Lori Woodley.
Woodley is a passionate environmentalist and activist for climate change and the general health of the planet.
Nature is incredibly important to Woodley, who uses her time in nature to destress and heal.
This actress’s goal is to leave as small of an eco-footprint as possible, taking her goal so seriously that she only uses hygiene products that come from the environment around her.
Shailene Woodley uses clay to brush her teeth, enjoys foraging for wild food, collecting spring water, and studying herbalism.
Her dedication to improving the environment led her and her mother to start a non-profit, educational organization called All It Takes.
All It Takes uses social-emotional learning to help grade school children learn the importance of compassion, empathy, responsibility, initiative, and purpose.
By teaching children why they should care about others, the organization also hopes children will learn to take care of their environment.
The organization teaches these lifelong lessons in a simple, three-step approach that children can grasp easily.
These steps are to notice, to choose, and then to act.
The first lesson that the organization teaches children is how to notice when there is a problem.
The children are also taught to notice when there may be problems within their own friend groups and communities.
The next step that All It Takes teaches is to choose whether the child will let the problem persist or they will be a part of the solution to the problem.
With each choice that the children make, they are taught to make that choice on purpose, rather than giving a mindless response.
Finally, they are taught to act on their decisions and to stay committed.
The Future For Shailene Woodley
After working with her on the set of The Descendants, George Clooney stated that he believed that people would be talking about Shailene Woodley for the next 40 years.
Since working with Clooney, Woodley has managed to become an actress with a diverse filmography of both television and movie projects.
Although illness almost ended Woodley’s career early, she was able to go on to create an entire television series and has another series on the way called Three Women where she’ll be playing a character named Gia.
In the 2022 movie, Misanthrope, Woodley will be going back to her roots to star in a murder mystery film where an FBI agent is desperately trying to hunt down a murderer.
She will also be playing Elaine in Robots alongside Jack Whitehall.
Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller will be starring in another movie together called The Fence, which follows the story of completely different neighbors who are divided by a nine-foot fence.
She will also be playing the lead role in Panopticon.
Just as Clooney guessed nearly a decade ago, Shailene Woodley’s name is popping up more commonly in hit films.
Her passion for acting has allowed her to create a successful career for herself.
NEXT: Why Is Connecticut So Expensive? (Top 10 Reasons)