Hollywood's New Age starlet

As the star of Divergent, a new young adult book-to-movie adaptation modelled after The Hunger Games (2008), 22-year-old Shailene Woodley is poised to give Jennifer Lawrence a run for her money as Hollywood's new It girl.

As it did with The Hunger Games star and Oscar winner Lawrence, 23, the publicity machine cranking up ahead of the movie's opening this week has cast her as an outsider - a down-to-earth, plain- speaking tomboy and occasional goofball who does not fit into the archetypical mould of a starlet.

But Woodley seems to be taking it further as she talks openly about her alternative, eco-friendly, New Age lifestyle, which apparently involves studying herbalism, making her own lotions and creams, reading horoscopes, wearing second-hand clothes, drinking spring water that she gathers herself and washing her hair once a month.

When she meets Life! and a group of other reporters in Los Angeles, she walks into the hotel room barefoot with a deer-antler pendant around her neck.

She is quick to point out that the themes in Divergent - the first of three films based on a series of best-selling books by Veronica Roth about a dystopian society where people have been segregated into five factions - are consistent with her passion for causes such as the environment and her own thoughts about social conformity.

"When I read this book, I really responded not only to the storyline and entertainment value, but also there are so many messages that I'm really passionate about for today's society," she says.

The film, in which she plays a girl, Tris, who rebels against society's expectations, holds up a mirror to problems that exist in the real world.

"The movie deals with genocide, for goodness' sake. And you have these young people running around with guns killing people and it doesn't glamorise that."

As for the underlying message about staying true to yourself even if you do not fit in, "the title alone is so powerful".

She adds: "To me, 'divergent' means every day waking up and owning my day before my day owns me. Like, being the full expression of myself and going out into the world and diverging from mediocrity, and sometimes talking about things that maybe we're not supposed to talk about."

And the things that she wants to talk about range from the dangers of genetically-modified food to the dangerous example set by another young adult franchise, the vampire-romance books and movies based on the Twilight saga.

"Twilight, I'm sorry, is about a very unhealthy, toxic relationship," she told Teen Vogue recently, adding that its heroine, Bella, "falls in love with this guy and the second he leaves her, her life is over and she's going to kill herself. What message are we sending to young people? That is not going to help this world evolve".

The Divergent franchise hopes to pick up where Twilight left off. Twilight made US$3.3 billion (S$4.1 billion) with five films from 2008 to 2012. If it does, it would propel Woodley's career to a whole new level.

The actress, who has been in show business since age five and received hundreds of rejections before her first TV commercial, is determined that fame and success will not change her.

As it is, she manages to shut out much of the media circus and fan attention "because I don't engage in social media", even though it has risen to fever pitch since she played George Clooney's daughter in The Descendants (2011), a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

As for talking to the press about her work, "you come and you do your job and you go home and hang out with your buddies. So, in a sense, you forget that this is even part of your world".

When fans come up to her, she tries to be "real" with them as possible, she says. "Now, more than ever with social media and the Internet, I think people feel like they know you when you don't.

"So it's an interesting line and river to cross. But the way it works for me is when I meet someone, I'm like, 'okay, look into my eyes - I'm real, you're real, let's at least exchange more than one materialistic conversation".

This same commitment to "realness" had Woodley going up to reporters she had never met and hugging them on a red carpet recently.

The California native credits her parents, whom she describes as "sort of hippie psychologists", for her groundedness and happy childhood.

"I was raised with the whole, 'so how does that make you feel?'" she says, laughing.

She also says she feels "zero pressure from external forces" to be anything other than herself, including the body-image pressure most women face from Hollywood and the fashion industry.

"I see magazine pictures of me and I'm like, 'My boobs aren't like that in real life'. You see the Divergent poster? I want her ass, that ass is not mine!"

Woodley - who will appear in another major young-adult film later this year, The Fault In Our Stars, playing a teenager battling cancer - is keen to debunk the so-called glamorous lifestyle that celebrities supposedly enjoy.

"The more people I meet in this industry, the more I realise that that lifestyle exists only when people write or talk about it," she tells Life!

"I remember when I went to the Oscars, it made me laugh because you spend hours getting ready and you put on the dress and heels, and you get there and everybody's sweating.

"They're glad to be there, but they're like, 'My Spanx really hurt and I'm kind of constipated'. Everybody's uncomfortable. And you go home and there's still dirty dishes in the sink and dog hair everywhere.

"When I watched the Oscars growing up, I thought, ah, they're Cinderellas at a ball, their lives are perfect. But that Hollywood life doesn't exist."

Divergent opens in cinemas here on Thursday.

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