The Fault In Our Stars actress Shailene Woodley had to chop her hair off to play the role of a cancer stricken teen, but she made sure the traumatic experience was worth it in the end.
You see, Shailene spent a very long time growing her beautiful locks “as long as possible” and when she found out she would have to cut them off for her new movie, she had a hard time letting go.
We saw Shailene Woodley’s gorgeous long hair, mostly in a ponytail, for her big hit Divergent in which she plays the heroine Tris, but in The Fault In Our Stars — the adaptation of the John Green novel of the same name — it’s a completely different story.
In the movie, Shailene plays Hazel, a teen that suffers from terminal brain cancer and has undergone a procedure to buy her some more time, when everything changes after she meets Augustus at the Cancer Kid Support Group.
Of course playing a cancer patient under treatment meant the long hair had to go and for Shailene, the experience was something she won’t soon forget and had her in tears:
“I might cry so hard you guys,” Woodley warned her stylists in a video of the traumatic event. “I’m so afraid to look.”
#wcw pic.twitter.com/zq4kzmPNh6
— Koo (@myboy_Koo) May 1, 2014
#Divergent #ShaileneWoodley pic.twitter.com/HSuhHJUmfj
— Marta G (@MartaGraudina) April 30, 2014
For Shailene it was not only the fact of having long hair, it meant something else, as she explained in a Tumblr post prior to the haircut:
“For the past ?ve years I’ve been on an I-want-to-grow-my-hair-as-long-as-possible kick…About half way through my hair-growing escapade, I began to deeply look at WHY I was so keen on creating ?owing locks down my spine. I ?nally came to the conclusion that hair, for me, was a symbol of strength … For the longest time, I was committed to never chopping it off. Cut to: now. On Saturday, it will be the shortest it’s ever been. and I feel so relieved, so ready, so dedicated.”
Since she had such a large chunk of hair, Shailene wanted to make sure to put it to good use and chose the worthy charity, Children With Hair Loss, donating her long locks to those in need.
Shailene Woodley has seen her star rise in 2014 thanks to her role in Divergent very much like Jennifer Lawrence saw hers take off when she first started in The Hunger Games. The Fault In Our Stars opens in theaters on June 6.
[Image via 20th Century Fox]