Shailene Woodley Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for TIME
It’s hard to imagine Big Little Lies without Shailene Woodley playing Jane Chapman, the single mother who moved to Monterey with her son, Ziggy — but that was almost a reality.
Woodley, 32, told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Thursday, October 31, that she initially passed on the opportunity to join the hit HBO series. As she tells it, she got the call for the role in late 2015, a time when she was “exhausted by the act of Hollywood.”
“And I got a call about Big Little Lies because Jean-Marc Vallée — our beautiful creator, director, who has since passed — had wanted me to play Jane. And I was desperate to work with him, I thought he was such an incredible artist and filmmaker.”
She turned down the role anyway because she wanted to take some time to “find” herself.
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Woodley then embarked on a three-week backpacking trip to India. But before she left, she got a call from Laura Dern, the actress who would become her costar.
Laura Dern Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images
“I got a call from Laura the day before I left for India — or maybe I was actually already in India and I hadn’t turned my phone off yet. And she just said, ‘Listen, I know where you’re at in your life. I’ve been there before too. It’s a lot. This world is an illusion, but what isn’t an illusion is what you love to do,’” she recalled.
She continued, “‘And what I see in you, Shai, is your purpose — at least in this moment in your life — is to be a storyteller. And I think it’s a massive mistake for you to walk away from this opportunity that you really should lean into.”
The call from Dern, who plays the outspoken and ambitious Renata Klein, caused Woodley to cut her trip abroad short. The actress reflected on how the call from Dern “changed [her] life.”
“In so many ways, I’m grateful for Laura,” she said. “But that was a massive moment of courageous friendship to say, ‘I think that you’re making a mistake and I’m gonna be brave enough to tell you why, cause I really see you and I see something you can’t see in your own life right now.’”
Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley. Todd Williamson/Getty Images
Season 2 of Big Little Lies aired in 2019. At first, HBO president Casey Bloys opined that season 3 probably wouldn’t happen because of how difficult it is to coordinate schedules with such a star-studded cast. In addition to Woodley and Dern, the show stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, Meryl Streep, Adam Scott, Kathryn Newton and more.
Things took an optimistic turn in 2020, however, when Kidman revealed that Liane Moriarty, who wrote the 2014 novel the show is based on, was working on a plot for the third season. In the years since, reports have gone back and forth about the show’s future, but Woodley gave fans some hope in her Vanity Fair interview.
“We have a text chain going and it’s constantly a check-in, every few weeks, ‘Hey, what’s the update?’ ‘It’s still happening,’” she said. “I keep being told that there’s going to be a season 3, but I haven’t read anything yet.”
