Breaking the girlie mould
Shailene Woodley picks something off the floor of the sunny patio; it's a stray Armani designer tag, apparently ripped off a stranger's blouse. "When at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills," she says wryly.
Woodley is the new face of a potential billion-dollar franchise but it's hard to tell. Today, the actress made her own lunch, sips from a glass jug of coffee she brought from home and is living "out of my suitcase", she says, in a temporary apartment rented by the studio.
She's one of the newly anointed in a class of stars breaking the mould of what, exactly, a star needs to be. The female film icons of today are no longer Barbies, or damsels in distress or sweethearts-in-training. They are like Woodley: funny, game, tough - and pragmatic about fame.
Currently hailed as the next Jennifer Lawrence, Woodley heads the latest dystopian sci-fi blockbuster-to-be, Divergent, based on the popular young adult book series by Veronica Roth.
"People are like, how does it feel to be doing all of this craziness," Woodley says, pouring a gooey vitamin C packet into a glass of water. She shrugs, sips. Life is not so different - yet.
"My current reality is waking up in the morning, maybe with one hour less sleep than I'm used to but that's not really that big of a difference. Making a bomb-ass coffee drink. And then having conversations with people all day."
Woodley, like Lawrence, was nurtured in the indie world, springing to fame as George Clooney's rebellious daughter in Alexander Payne's The Descendants and wowing critics in the low-budget love story The Spectacular Now (all while earning her keep on ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager).
Born in LA to a middle-school counsellor mum and a former high- school counsellor father, she's been in the biz since she was five, when she began booking commercials.
Now 22, she's in franchise territory. Divergent takes place in a futuristic Chicago ravaged by war, where the surviving population has been divided into five factions, as determined by strongest personality traits: Abnegation, Amity, Candour, Dauntless and Erudite.
Woodley plays Tris Prior, an Abnegation-born teen who must pick her future faction based on the results of a state-driven hallucinatory test.
Where Harry Potter had a sorting hat and Katniss' fate was selected by the hand of Effie Trinket, Tris meets hers on Choosing Day, after her exam comes back inconclusive, meaning she is divergent, a dangerous mutant in this military- like environment that's held under the thumb of power-hungry Erudite Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet).
Tris is pulled to the fearless, tattooed Dauntless, a choice that forever rips her from her family.
"Tris goes from being a really ordinary person to being something much more powerful, and Shailene has that 'girl next door' quality," says director Neil Burger (Limitless).
"There's an unassuming quality about her which I thought was perfect for Tris."
The initiation process to join Dauntless, viewed as the protectors of all the factions, means Tris must learn to fight her fellow initiates, jump aboard racing trains, and face her darkest fears. All while slowly being pulled towards her chiselled, tough Dauntless mentor, Four (Theo James).
"I fell off the train once, which was really scary," says Woodley, who did most of her own stunts. "But the hardest thing was fighting Theo because he's so tough and he's a boxer in real life."
