Shailene Woodley loves dancing with hairy pits & wearing war paint
Shailene Woodley must have sensed that Cameron Diaz had taken over the TMI interview quota for the month. Cameron even overshadowed Shailene’s essential oils fixation with an antiperspirant rant. Never fear, Shailene is back. She’s promoting The Fault In Our Stars, in which she plays a teenager with cancer.
Shailene covers the May/June issue of Natural Health magazine, which is where she belongs. This was probably her most treasured magazine shoot because the magazine fits her vibe so well. There is no threat of McDonalds for this audience. This interview is typical Shailene. There’s no comment on the elusive sunshine vadge, but “foraging for wild leeks in Maine” comes up. She doesn’t detail how she crafts weapons from nature, but she muses upon “the juxtaposition of the ignorance on the ground against the beauty and freedom in the sky.” This girl never runs out of things to say. Especially when she’s talking about her hair-filled armpits and, um, dancing while wearing “war paint.” Uh-oh:
Why she loves the environment: “There’s one defining moment that I’ll never forget: It was an incredibly windy day and I was walking through the quad of my public high school, which is surrounded by pine trees. There were hundreds of pine needles swirling around in the air, and I looked down and scattered across this huge grassy expanse was all of the trash left over from lunch — plastic bags, soda cans, that kind of thing. And something just clicked when I saw the juxtaposition of the ignorance on the ground against the beauty and freedom in the sky. That’s when I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to this, because there’s something really wrong here.”
Do her friends think she’s odd? “All of them live that lifestyle already, so I’m fortunate. We joke that our conversations sound like a Sh-t Wild People Say video. We were foraging for wild leeks in Maine last year, and one of my friends said, ‘Does anyone want the rest of my rhizome?’ And we all cracked up, thinking that only here and with this group of people would someone ask that question.”
Her herbalism obsession: “When I started researching agriculture in America, I thought, People say meat’s bad for me, but so are vegetables because of pesticides, but I can’t afford organic. Ahhhh! So I decided to research what Native American cultures ate in Southern California, as well as other indigenous cultures from around the world. I found that not only were they hunter-gatherers, they were also healers who relied on the plants around them. I thought that was really profound, so I started learning about all the wild plants in my area, as well as all of the wild medicines that I could gather and create for myself. I was in control of my body, and I could feel what was happening. It was eye-opening.”
Balancing Hollywood & her hippie ways: “I find myself living in two worlds sometimes — being this person who can walk a red carpet in a huge, fancy-ass ball gown, high heels and mountains of makeup, but also being the girl at a hippie festival in the middle of the forest with war paint on my face, dancing around with hairy armpits. I exist so well in both, and I used to feel like I had to choose one or the other. I struggled with that up until doing The Fault in Our Stars. I have one life to live, and it could end any minute, so I’m going to appreciate every single moment. I’m going to own my day before my day owns me. Show up the way you expect others and the world to show up for you, and that’s all there is to it. Life is too fleeting, too unpredictable and too unfair to focus on anything else.”
[From Natural Health]
I can’t knock Shailene for her hairy pits. That’s just her. She IS transforming into a caricature of herself with each interview. Shailene borders on pretention with her turns of phrase, but I think she really thinks like this. Instead of saying, “a field,” Shailene says “huge grassy expanse.” She actually does forage for leeks and berries. It sounds so exhausting.
The “war paint” could be more problematic. She might be kidding (nah). Is Shailene appropriating Native American culture for her own ends? Heidi Klum recently did so, and Vanessa Hudgens was papped dancing in a headdress this year at Coachella. Given Shailene’s obsession with “indigenous people,” is it offensive that she describes wearing “war paint” at hippie gatherings?
War paint. At hippie gatherings.
Photos courtesy of Natural Health & WENN
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