What happened to Shailene Woodley?

Some actors completely disappear from our screens for long periods of time, and more often than not, we assume it’s because the job market is tough since Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are snatching up all the roles. But that’s not exactly what happened to Shailene Woodley.

Many of us were introduced to her in 2008 with The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but it was in 2014 that Woodley had the best year of her career, landing leading roles in two major Hollywood films: John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and Veronica Roth’s Divergent. While the Divergent trilogy received mixed, often negative, reviews, The Fault in Our Stars was a box-office success, quickly establishing the then 21-year-old as the next Jennifer Lawrence.

In a recent interview, Woodley revealed that her roaring twenties were not as glamorous as they seemed, candidly admitting that filming Divergent was far more challenging than we might have imagined. Here’s why.

What happened to Shailene Woodley in Divergent?

During her appearance on the SHE MD podcast, hosted by Mary Alice Haney and Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi, the 32-year-old actress admitted that during the filming of the Divergent series, she was incredibly ill—though she does not feel the need to disclose her diagnosis. “It got to the point where I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours and hours and hours and sleep,” she said.

This mysterious illness persisted for almost a decade, exhausting her both mentally and physically as she couldn’t find a cause. “Everything I ate hurt my stomach. It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things,” she said. “Then, going into the mental fuckery that can happen with that — of body dysmorphia and confusion about identity and feeling safe in my own capsule, in my own skin, and what that meant and what that should be.”

Although it took time, Woodley is grateful to share that her body began to heal once she started healing mentally as well. “It was a journey that, ultimately, physically resolved itself. And I am very healthy. I’m so happy to be able to say that.” In the end, this situation, however undesirable it may have been, forced the actress to “become introspective.”

In the same conversation, she also shared that many of her health problems stemmed from issues with her “reproductive and female cycle,” which led her to visit multiple doctors in hopes of finding answers, but to no avail. “Every person I went to was giving me mixed information, and it set me on my own journey of, ‘OK … I don’t feel safe with any of these people that are guiding me because I feel like they actually are figuring it out along the way as well,'” she said.

This forced the actress to take a holistic approach to her health and accept that sometimes you have to trust your body and gut feelings to make real changes. “I believe, ultimately, the thing that led me there, alongside, again, the physical aspects, was acknowledging that I was in a constant state of fight or flight,” she said. “My nervous system was super sympathetic and just very much operating from a place of fear.”

While this conversation occurred relatively recently, it was not the first time Woodley spoke about her health issues. Back in 2021, she spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, admitting that her physical health had become incredibly “debilitating” and that, ultimately, she was forced to take care of herself after years of self-neglect.