Shailene Woodley and Kate Winslet first met when they collaborated on the hit film adaptation Divergent. After they got to know each other, Woodley confided that Winslet had a profound impact on her life that ultimately shaped who she’d become.
Kate Winslet helped guide Shailene Woodley through Hollywood
It seems that Winslet and Woodley were able to relate to each other immediately when they came together on the Divergent set. Woodley was just entering another realm of superstardom at the time. She’d graduated from doing her hit television series Secret Life of the American Teenager and went on to the big screen. Soon after her critically acclaimed performance in The Descendants, Woodley was quickly becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
She was aware that Divergent might only expand her fame even more, which was why she was hesitant to take on the project at first. Fortunately, she had someone like Winslet to help her navigate through the film industry. In a recent interview on The Drew Barrymore Show, Woodley reflected on just how important the Titanic star was to her development.
“I was 21. I had all, you know, the influx of public life and being told ‘you should look a certain way’ or ‘you should be a certain thing’ or ‘don’t eat that’ or ‘do this’ or ‘dye your hair a different color,’” Woodley remembered.
Winslet especially knew what that felt like. She’d been very candid about the body image issues she used to experience early in her career. So when seeing Woodley having a similar identity crisis, she gave her younger co-star invaluable advice.
“She gave me that moment. And I wouldn’t – I would not be who I am today without her,” Woodley said.
Why Kate Winslet felt Shailene Woodley was unusual for her age
Likewise, Winlset was very impressed by Woodley after meeting her. In a resurfaced interview with the HuffPost, Winslet didn’t divulge what exactly she told Woodley behind the scenes. But she was already proud of how well she was handling the film industry at such a young age.
“She’s a very gentle and grounded person, so I suppose I could say that I’m not worried about her,” Winslet said. “She knows the industry extremely well. She has a really wonderful family, too. Yeah, of course we talked about it. Of course we do. It’s a great privilege to be able to share the experiences I have had with her. Am I going to be specific about what we shared? No. But she’s going to be just fine. She’s a really great human being. She’s going to be tremendous actually.”
However, Winslet asserted that there was a unique difference between the two.
“She has values that are very, very important to her and she lives by them 100 percent. That is very unusual. I don’t think I possessed to that extent,” Winslet once told The Providence Journal.
Although Winslet didn’t provide any specifics, Woodley has typically displayed an intense passion for what she believes in. Woodley has been an advocate for environment issues from a young age. Her activism even resulted in her being arrested at one point after protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. She’s also worked with several environmental organizations such as All it Takes, GoodLeap, Greenpeace, and several more.
Kate Winslet felt fame might’ve been harder on Shailene Woodley than it was for her
Winslet was everywhere during the peak of her Titanic fame. So much so that she intentionally sought out much smaller films to dim down her spotlight a bit. Still, she felt Woodley had it much worse during her own rise to stardom than she did thanks to social media.
“The one thing I would say is for both Shai and [her co-star] Theo [James], it’s been harder for them than it was for me,” Winslet once told Time. “The simple reason is social media is what it is. It literally is a dominating beast, and we didn’t have that back then. And when I say back then, do you have any idea how long ago it really was? I’m turning 40 this year! Leo [DiCaprio] turned 40 last year! It’s a long time ago. Now, with the Internet, and the way social media works, it’s all so much faster and so much more intense. For these guys, there is literally no escape.”
But Woodley’s strategy for dealing with the attention was similar to Winslet’s back in the day.
“The way I coped with it is just by standing on my own two feet, focusing on the work, reminding myself that I do this job because I love it and not reading anything,” she said. “Ignoring all the hype. To a certain extent, that’s what Shai has been doing because that’s her way anyway.”
