Shailene Woodley still gets emotional when talking about her relationship with ex-fiancé Aaron Rodgers. The Divergent star, 33, offered rare comments about her romance with the former NFL player, which came to an end in 2022, in a new interview with Outside magazine.
“I haven’t shared much about my relationship with Aaron because it always makes me cry,” the actress noted as the profile noted that her eyes welled with tears. “It was not right. But it was beautiful.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
The Big Little Lies star and Rodgers, 41, ended their engagement in February 2022, a year after going public with their relationship. They then split for good that April. Woodley didn’t get specific about the end of her romance with the athlete, but told Outside she had a “really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022.”
“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” the actress shared. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.” Woodley confessed that she chose to stay in the “toxic situation” because she was empathizing with “someone else.” “Empathy,” she noted, “kind of kept me in this loop of feeling everything for everyone.”
About six months after her traumatic experience, Woodley said her depression began to fade with the help of her stylist Kris Zero. “I knew I was depressed when I looked at a tree and felt nothing. That was the lowest low of my life,” the Fault in Our Stars actress said, recalling Zero waking her up every morning with music to get her out of bed.
“Sometimes I was so angry at her,” Woodley said. “But then we’d go surf, and for [10] 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 f–king horse ranch, and we’d clean up horse s–t. 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!’”
