Here’s What It’s Like to Go Camping with Shailene Woodley

The camp chairs are set up. A cracked clipboard rests under my arm. I’m stuffed into my mom jeans. It’s showtime.

June gloom blankets Encinal Canyon in a lush mist. I could be in Narnia instead of Malibu, but I barely notice. My body stands in front of a marooned Airstream, waiting. But my mind is back home, wondering if my 14-month-old is napping as I review the research on my clipboard. Tonight I’ll camp in this patch of Eden with Shailene Woodley, the 33-year-old actor and environmentalist known for her lead roles in The Fault in Our Stars, the Divergent trilogy, and the series Big Little Lies, instead of sleeping at home with my daughter. It’s the first time I’ve been away from her overnight.

“There she is,” a member of our six-woman crew says. An electric sedan with a mint green surfboard on top crunches to a stop. A luminous creature in a pastel silk shirt emerges and wraps me in a hug. My mind freezes. My clipboard is blank on basic human greetings.

“I had to stop at REI and get a new sleeping pad,” Woodley says, rolling her eyes. “I left my old one with my ex.” The actress is no stranger to camping, and remarkably at home in the outdoors. From a young age, she’s felt a kinship with and responsibility toward the natural world. Her lifelong commitment to environmental work started when, as a freshman at Simi Valley High School, she rallied her fellow students to petition for a recycling program. Since then she’s become an outspoken advocate for the climate, working with various nonprofits and NGOs and participating in the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We sit under an ancient oak tree in collapsible chairs. If Woodley has a phone, I don’t see it. When I ask about it she says, “I guess I’m addicted to real interaction.” She glimpses mine and coos at the wallpaper photo of my baby. When I tell her I met the love of my life at 39 she says, “You give me hope!”

Woodley radiates something I can’t place. Youth and beauty? Sure. But that’s everywhere in Hollywood. Later, when I play back the recording of our conversation, I hear how rushed I sound, so determined to ask all the questions, to get somewhere. But she’s in no hurry. She’s right here.

When my editor asked me to profile Woodley as an Outsider of the Year, he said we could arrange to meet her anywhere. I fantasized about Patagonia or Fiji, but instead Woodley chose Leo Carrillo State Park in western Malibu, where she grew up camping. She was born some 70 miles east of here, in Upland, and her family camped “constantly,” at nearby state beaches starting when she was just a few months old.

Her father refurbished a disgusting RV he found in the desert for that purpose. “I can still smell it,” she says. Easters and Thanksgivings were spent at Leo Carrillo and Big Sycamore State Parks. (Easter eggs are probably still hiding in the trees, she muses.)

Unfortunately, all the permits were scooped up months ago, but we found an idyllic piece of undeveloped private land nearby. The owner occasionally hosts weddings up in a meadow with an ocean view. We’re nestled near a creek lined with verdant foliage and graceful sycamores.

“There’s this idea of nature—that we have to leave and go someplace to find it,” Woodley says. “It’s everywhere. I look at flour if I’m baking and I’m like, You came from the earth? God, you’re so cool.”

One of the people who modeled this attention to small details for her was Woodley’s grandmother, a naturopath. In a 2015 Elle interview, Woodley said that her grandmother was a bedrock of support and wisdom. She’d tell the young star, “You must live from your deep heart.” I recite this line back to Woodley and explain how, at the time I read them, those words helped me navigate away from a relationship and a job that were sapping my spirit.

“Oh, my God, I love that,” Woodley says, tearing up. “Yeah, she said that all the time.”

I bring up another interview, this one with Shape magazine, where she talks about her relationship with the sea and describes feeling the ocean’s suffering as if it were her own. “I’m all water!” She waves her hand. “Scorpio sun, Pisces moon, Cancer rising—I can’t talk about anything without crying.”

When I later speak with one of Woodley’s longtime friends, the actor and model Cara Delevingne, she explains that she didn’t believe people like Woodley existed before they met—not in Hollywood, not anywhere. “She is her heart. It’s not that she wears it on her sleeve. She’s just heart.”

These instincts, and this porous way of being in the world, have powered Woodley’s acting career since she was five. Her first lead role in a TV series came with ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager in 2008. Three years later, she stole scenes from George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. When Hollywood success came her way in 2014—playing a teen cancer patient in The Fault in Our Stars and the hero of the Divergent sci-fi trilogy—she went small. She stored a few belongings in her mom’s garage, gave up everything else she owned that wouldn’t fit in a carry-on, slept on friends’ couches, and explored the far reaches of the globe when she wasn’t working.

She describes this chapter of her life as an experiment in how to inhabit the world with intention and minimal impact. “Sleeping in the same place you shit, basically,” she says with a smile. She was a happy vagabond without a home for ten years.

One of those couches belonged to Laura Dern, who bonded with Woodley while playing her mother in The Fault in Our Stars. Dern talks about waking up in L.A. one day to find Woodley in the kitchen making almond milk and hatching a plan to take Dern’s two preteens to MTV’s Video Music Awards that night as her “dates.”

When I ask about Woodley’s relationship with the wild, Dern says, “We keep grasping at how to be more connected to nature through our lives. Most of us. Shailene is nature.” It’s one thing, Dern says, to run the standard celebrity playbook, raising money and doing media appearances for environmental causes. It’s another to put your body into the fight. In 2016, Woodley was arrested along with 26 other protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. She was jailed, strip-searched, and given a year’s probation. In a piece she later wrote for Time, she urged people to shift their attention away from her. The hashtag #FreeShailene had gone viral, and she implored readers to consider the impact that a slogan like #ProtectCleanWater or #HonorNativeTreaties might’ve had, had it received the same attention.

Back under the oak tree, my voice speeds up as I get into her environmental work. I’m eager to show off my research. Did she want to talk about her caravan for Bernie Sanders in 2016? How about her 2019 expedition to the Sargasso Sea to learn about the impact of plastics? Or supporting a call to the United Nations in 2022 for a treaty to protect ocean life beyond national jurisdictions?

Woodley politely absorbs my regurgitation of her résumé. I stumble onto the “now” section of the clipboard, and she reanimates when I mention Hope in the Water, a 2024 PBS documentary project about sustainably sourced seafood. The three-part series was conceived by David E. Kelley, the writer and producer who cast Woodley in the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies. He chose her to play Jane Chapman, a sexual-assault survivor and single mother, because of the way she radiated honesty.

“That honesty obviously makes her a better actor, because she finds the truth in the scenes,” Kelley told me. “But it also gives her underlying credibility. If she said, ‘Follow me into the woods and I’ll keep you safe,’ you might believe her.”

In Hope in the Water, Woodley is one of four celebrity hosts. In her episode, she learns about “zombie” sea urchins that are destroying kelp forests along the California coast. During an ocean outing, she surprised members of Kelley’s crew. He got a call. “She’s jumping in the water!” a crew member said. “That’s her,” Kelley recalls. “She’s gonna dive in.”

Sitting across from me now, Woodley opens up about her work with Conservation International, whose board she sits on. The nonprofit works broadly across sectors, funding research and innovation to support biodiversity, sustainable agriculture, and more. The way she sums up their mission is: “Nature heals nature. We just need to get out of the way.”

Of course, it takes a lot of work to get out of the way. CI operates in 29 countries, with more than 2,000 partners. M. Sanjayan, the group’s CEO, likes to put Woodley in front of corporate leaders. “She can speak truth to power,” he says. “She points out what we will all lose in no uncertain terms.” And then she points out how the companies could be doing more.

Woodley agrees that corporate coalitions play a vital role in fundamental change, and that it’s worth doing the outreach work to actually make things happen. “I want to be part of the rebuild of this planet,” she says.

For Woodley, caring for the earth and caring for people come from the same place. “We’re apathetic toward the experience of nature because we’re apathetic toward the experience of one another,” she says.

But when I tell her she strikes me as an incredibly empathic person, her face falls. “To a fault,” she says. She’s recently emerged from her own rebuild. “I had a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022,” she says. She’s not specific, but I know that her engagement to NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers was called off that February.

“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” she says. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.” She takes a breath. She chose to remain in a “toxic situation,” she says, because she was empathizing with “someone else.” “Empathy,” she says, “kind of kept me in this loop of feeling everything for everyone.”

Woodley credits her best friend, stylist Kris Zero—who’s scheduled to style the shoot this afternoon—with saving her life. “I knew I was depressed when I looked at a tree and felt nothing,” she says. “That was the lowest low of my life.” In the aftermath, Zero woke Woodley up every morning, blasting music to get her out of bed.

“Sometimes I was so angry at her,” Woodley says. “But then we’d go surf, and for ten minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. Then the depression would come back and she’d go, ‘We’re volunteering at the horse ranch!’ And we’d find a random fucking horse ranch, and we’d clean up horse shit. We’d clean hooves and brush the horses, and for 20 minutes that day I thought life could be OK again. And then the depression came back and she’d wake me up the next morning and go, ‘Let’s go on a hike and bring trash bags and clean up trash!’ ” After about six months of this, the depression started to fade.

Earlier in our conversation she said, “I haven’t shared much about my relationship with Aaron because it”—her eyes well up—“always makes me cry. It was not right. But it was beautiful.”

A second EV with a surfboard on top curls down a steep path and stops next to our oak tree, music blaring. The raven-haired driver is chic in the effortless way of California surfer girls. It’s Zero. The friends holler back and forth. Zero hands us green teas from Starbucks.

Golden light glints off the Airstream. It’s the magic hour. Time for the photo shoot. I follow Woodley downhill and turn off the recorder on my phone. She tells me I should have brought my baby along. Her voice is so soft that I almost miss her final remark: “One of my biggest dreams is to be a mom.”

Woodley climbs up into a sycamore as Caroline Tompkins, our tattooed photographer from Brooklyn, snaps away. Zero serves as DJ, blasting music with her car windows down. With her hands low on a large branch, Woodley shakes her butt in the air. “Outside’s first twerk!” our photo editor jokes. Everyone hoots. Woodley moves into a full-body hug with a thick limb.

While the crew resets, Woodley picks her way down, careful not to damage the peeling bark. She’s less concerned with her pale green manicure, which has flaked, betraying a thin line of dirt underneath. She’s not wearing makeup; the only thing on her face is an oil she blends at home.

The seven of us, in two cars, set out for the next location and pause at the side of a winding canyon road. Woodley pops out and dances barefoot to Melissa Carpenter’s “Makin’ Memories.”

“Always barefoot,” Zero chuckles. Some of the crew join in—women ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties, strangers just a few hours ago. Photo shoots can be notoriously hierarchical, but Woodley sets the tone. She wants everyone to have a good time.

The westering sun glows over faces and hair, and I can’t help but notice how beautiful everyone looks. By the time we’re sitting on a bumper, taking a selfie while we flash our bras, this assignment has become a girls’ trip. I’ve lost my clipboard.

We’d planned to go back to the campsite and cook over Colemans, but we’re cold and hungry now and opt instead for the back table of an empty café. Almost everyone orders the green soup Woodley swears is the best. The youngest member of our party, a production assistant who’s an aspiring comedian, sits across from me. PAs are the grunts, the invisible servants. Celebrities don’t usually talk to them on set unless it’s to order coffee.

But I hear Woodley ask her, “What’s your type?” Because maybe she knows somebody to fix her up with on a date? I’m sure this is just polite talk. Irrepressible and quick, the PA tosses her blond bob theatrically and declares, “Well, I like to be the pretty one.” My face hurts from laughing.

Zero offers us a ride to camp, and without a word Woodley gets in back—letting my six-foot-four frame ride shotgun.

Midnight fog rolls so thick through the canyon, I could carve out two scoops and eat it like ice cream. The air is warm, but my tent is soaked. I should have put up the rain fly earlier, and now I’m stumbling around fixing corners. My limbs are heavy but my heart buzzes. I won’t be able to sleep for an hour.

I can’t see the other tents, which are buried in the brush only 30 feet away. I’m inside a cloud. Or a lake. A chorus of male frogs bellows from the stream next to me—an opera about love and lost insects, about living between water and land and not belonging fully to either. Maybe I should have skipped that second cocktail.

I hear footsteps—not close but not far. “I love life,” the voice says. Not to me, not to anyone. It’s Woodley.

I’m tempted to say that I feel younger than I have in a long time, but that’s not it. What we long for and miss about youth isn’t the smooth skin and lack of a mortgage; it’s the experience of presence, of time changing shape. I sense it slow and swell around me like water finding its way down a mountain, polishing every pebble along the way. The goal isn’t to feel young again—it’s to feel this present, this awed, this saturated with life.

I fall asleep with frogs echoing in my head.

After a morning of lounging and enjoying the beach, we say our goodbyes on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. I notice Woodley typing into the PA’s phone. She’s sharing her number because she does in fact want to fix her up on a date.

“What would it be like if Shailene Woodley introduced you to your person?” I’ll ask later when the PA drives me back to base camp.

“It would make me believe God exists,” she’ll deadpan, seemingly only half kidding.

Everyone lingers on the side of the PCH. Zero returns from the ocean, dripping, surfboard on her head, arms carved from marble. The waves were terrible, she says, but “at least I got to pee!”

My body knows it’s time to go. I’m exhausted and need caffeine but can’t quite get in the car yet.

I hoist Woodley’s surfboard over the top of her car, and she attaches it to the rack. My eyes squint against the hard white sky. Then she casts off into the pulsing current of the Pacific Coast Highway, her car shimmering like a fish, recognizable for a moment and then gone.