Recent months have been very kind to the career of young actress Shailene Woodley. Not only did she make herself ridiculously famous basically overnight by standing toe-to-toe with George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, but recently she signed on to play the very high profile role of Mary Jane Watson in Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man sequel.
This freight train of success isn’t stopping with acclaimed dramas and big comic book blockbusters, however, because Heat Vision is reporting that Woodley is now closing in on a deal to star in the next big YA adaptation, Divergent.
Divergent, if you’ll remember, is the first adaptation of a planned trilogy of Veronica Roth novels, and is set to be directed by Neil Burger (The Illusionist). Amazon’s description of Roth’s novel gives the story the following synopsis:
“In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.”
An interesting side note to Woodley signing on to play Beatrice is that it’s revealed a bit more information regarding her involvement in the Spider-Man series. Apparently she originally thought that the schedules of Divergent and the Amazing Spider-Man sequel would overlap too much for her to take both parts, but, as it turns out, her role as Mary Jane is actually a very small one in Webb’s second film, and is mostly there just to set up a more expanded presence in his series’ third installment. While its existence was probably always inevitable, this is the first concrete talk we’ve heard about plans to extend Webb’s Spider-Man series all the way out to a trilogy.
By the time all is said and done and all of these movies get released, we may find ourselves living in a dystopian future where half of the world is under the control of Woodley and the other half is ruled by Jennifer Lawrence. Which, you know, doesn’t sound so bad at all.