Shailene Woodley

Shailene Woodley spent five years on ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the sort of credit that usually seals a career shut. Instead Alexander Payne cast her in The Descendants in 2011, and she was so plainly better than the situation required that it reset everything: a Golden Globe nomination, an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female, and an instant reputation as the most naturalistic young actor in American film.

The naturalism is real and specific. Woodley acts like someone who has forgotten there is a camera, with unfinished sentences, sudden laughter, and a way of listening that makes her scene partners better. The Spectacular Now is the clean demonstration, a teenage romance where nothing is heightened and every beat still lands. The Fault in Our Stars took the same instrument into a mass-market weepie and made it work considerably better than the material deserved.

Then came Divergent: three films of a young-adult franchise that grew steadily less interested in her, and which stopped without finishing its own story. It cost her several years. What she has done since is quieter and better chosen. Jane Chapman in Big Little Lies is the strongest television work she has, a survival film shot largely on open water gave her Adrift, and supporting parts in The Mauritanian, Ferrari and Dumb Money have kept her in serious rooms. The talent visible in 2011 never went anywhere. The industry simply spent a while trying to make her into something she is not.