Why Shailene can’t stay put

MANILA, Philippines – There was a lull of about half an hour between our roundtable interviews with The Divergent Series: Allegiant stars Zoe Kravitz and Shailene Woodley last Sunday in Beverly Hills. While waiting for Shailene to join us, some journalists opted to go to the junket’s social media suite in the second floor of the Four Seasons and had our pictures with the cast via a green screen photo shoot. We also tried the super cool nine-minute virtual reality experience developed based on the movie.

We returned to our room after we were advised that Shailene would be ready to join us any minute. While waiting for her, our group of journalists got to talk about the new series titled Love that Netflix debuted recently. We were having a spirited discussion about why the series has split audiences who view it as either pro or against women when Shailene walked in. She caught some of what we were discussing and asked curiously how we were doing and what she missed.

We told her about the show and she told us she has not seen it and she’s been missing on a lot of things lately because of work.

Shailene has been on a hot streak since her breakout role in The Descendants five years ago. She has since starred in the box-office hit The Fault in Our Stars and has earned critical praise for her turns in White Bird in a Blizzard and in The Spectacular Now for which she won an acting prize from the Sundance Film Festival. Allegiant is the third film in the planned four-part series based on Veronica Roth’s bestselling YA series of books The Divergent. The actress also headlines Snowden opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Oliver Stone’s potentially powerful biopic of Edward Snowden, the CIA employee who leaked classified information about NSA surveillance activities.

So, yes, when Shailene told us she’s been busy, we know she’s busy. So busy in fact that she does not even have a permanent address!

“One day,” she told us after we asked her if she still lives out of a suitcase. “I have right now a little airbnb situation (she is referring to the current craze of people renting their homes for short or extended stays for a fraction of what hotels charge).”

“Who really wants to live in a hotel? I don’t,” she added. “Some people like that hotel life but it is not for me. I work a lot so it doesn’t really make sense to me to pay rent in a place for it to be empty.”

Despite the lack of a permanent home, Shailene has one of the most enviable careers in Hollywood right now and she is thankful for it. “I live a very beautiful life. I get to travel a lot. I get to meet really interesting people. This is my reality right now. It’s just what is. I can be grateful for it or I can look at it from a negative place but I choose to very grateful for it.”

In some ways, Shailene is pretty much like Tris, her character in Allegiant. Like her, Tris is a free spirit who doesn’t want to be confined in a particular place.

But, unlike her, Tris had to struggle a bit in the beginning to figure out who she is.

“In the first film, she doesn’t really know who she was and, in this movie, she’s not confined by the restrictions of knowing exactly who she is but she has a strong grasp of who she is and who she wants to be,” Shailene explained of her character.

In Allegiant, Tris, together with Four, played by handsome Brit Theo James, leads a group of fellow divergents on a harrowing escape from the walled city of what was formerly Chicago. What they discover outside the walls is a desolate and toxic wasteland known as the fringe and a city-oasis in the middle controlled by yet another mysterious leader known only as David.

The third series installment offers impressive set pieces and action-packed sequences including a thrilling escape where Tris and her group had to scale the formidable, electrified wall. This writer thought the thrilling escape was all special effects but Zoe Kravitz, who plays Christina, corrected me. “It wasn’t all special effects,” she said. “They made it look bigger in the film but they built a wall and we trained a while learning how to climb up it. But we really did scale the wall.”

Shailene, who takes good care of her body and who once told this writer, during our interview for Fault… that she mixes her own organic drink every morning, confirmed what Zoe told us and added: “The great thing about action is you just have to be fit enough to do something for a few minutes.”

“It’s fun!” she stated when asked how she found those action scenes. “So fun — the things that we don’t get to do in real life.”

Real life for Shailene is making movies, hanging out with friends when she has time, traveling, enjoying life and supporting the social and environmental causes that she feels are important and need to be addressed urgently.

And in a rather odd coincidence, Allegiant presents a world that’s been utterly destroyed by man’s greed and ambition at the expense of his natural environment. One journalist asked Shailene what she would do if she had the power to change the world.

“I’d first and foremost address climate change because that s—t is real and it should be addressed,” she declared. “You can do everything on a small level whether it is unplugging things or using very little amounts of water to standing up against pipelines, against fossil fuels.”

Another powerful theme that Allegiant also tackles is the one that mirrors the highly-controversial issue in Hollywood these days surrounding diversity or lack thereof. The star offered an insightful and thoughtful take on the subject when asked to comment.

“I think diversity is important. It’s important for everyone to be different, have different opinions, different thoughts. It’s just how you categorize diversity. Are you categorizing diversity because of gender, because of race, because of belief system or are we categorizing diversity based on the fact that you are studying genetics and she studied how to make a good movie and he knows how to vacuum the floor?”

Allegiant presents a world where people are divided by their genetic purity and that control rests only on one person whose world view is to dominate the lesser and imperfect race.

“Diversity is important because it enables us to learn things from one another in our community but I think it is also important to differentiate the subject of diversity and the subject of segregation.”

“Ultimately, there’s going to be chaos in every world no matter who is the captain of the ship. Chaos is part of human nature, you’re always going to have polarities, you’re always going to have people that disagree but the thing about these movies that I love is you have a group of protagonists who are committed to trying to help their community thrive amidst the chaos.”

The beautiful actress is not a political person and has not directly endorsed any US presidential contenders but she proudly told us how much she shares what one candidate stands for on many issues.

“I agree with a lot of things that Bernie Sanders talks about when it comes to climate change, education, equal rights, when it comes to support of the LGBT community — there’s many things that I support in his campaign but I think it is important that we can focus on just the fact that we have election and we are voting and ultimately it doesn’t really matter who you vote for.”

“I just encourage young people to go out there and actually vote,” she added almost imploring. “I think it is easier to sit at home and think that your one voice won’t make a difference but it absolutely will.”

Does she feel a certain pressure as an actress and a public figure to have a stand on certain issues and lend her voice to various causes?

“I don’t feel like I have to but I feel like I want to,” she replied. “There’s no reason why actors shouldn’t have the platform that we have. But we have it and I feel like why would we abuse it and not use it for the greater good?”

And she would like to remind everyone that “actors are just artists. We’re not anything else apart from artists. I think it is important for the public to recognize that we are just people.”

The Divergent Series: Allegiant opens today. It is released locally by Pioneer Films.