Shailene Woodley – The next blockbuster youngster

The youngsters are taking over Hollywood. Fresh faces and talent has always been the currency of Hollywood but the past few years have taken this trend off the charts. Seemingly a newcomer, but not actually, 22-year-old Shailene Woodley is going to have a quite a year ahead of her this year as she becoming one of the most talked-about young actresses – after Jennifer Lawrence, that is, who Shailene is actually compared to quite a lot.

Shailene has made one of the most difficult transitions in Hollywood that is moving from Indie cinema to mainstream, commercial cinema. Her only major screen credit until this year has been her role as George Clooney’s complicated daughter in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning screenplay, “The Descendants”. But she has also appeared in lower budget films like “The Spectacular Now” coincidently with her “Divergent” co-star Miles Teller which released a few weeks ago and for which she won the Dramatic Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the recent Gregg Araki film,” White Bird in a Blizzard” also starring Eva Green.

Shailene is being praised by critics and fans for trying to be ‘real’ in Hollywood where a lot can be fake. She does interviews barefoot and gives people hugs; it’s no wonder she’s being likened to Jennifer Lawrence who also has a way with her fans. Shailene’s upcoming lead role in “The Fault In Our Stars”, based on John Green’s novel, in which she plays a cancer patient who falls for a fellow sufferer, will release in June this year.

Shailene began her career with a number of smaller roles in television serials like “The OC” and “Cold Case” before landing the lead role of ABC Family’s series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” which aired from July 2008 till June 2013 and kick-started her career.

“The Fault In Our Stars” will follow the success of Shailene’s performance in “Divergent” which released in March this year, based on the best-selling young-adult novel by Veronica Roth, where she plays Tris, a 16-year-old living in a futuristic society where all the inhabitants are separated into groups based on their particular strength or virtue. “Divergent” did well at the box office and was cited to have done so because of it’s somewhat similarity to “The Hunger Games”. With two much talked-about films out in the same year, a few months apart, it’s going to be a good year for Shailene who has already managed to create great momentum as an actress after working hard for so long.