Shailene Woodley Drags ‘Secret Life of the American Teenager’s Anti-Sex Message

Shailene Woodley may have gotten her big break in ABC Family drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but she doesn’t look back fondly on the experience. In a recent interview with Bustle, the actress revealed that she felt “stuck” on the teen drama, which adopted an increasingly pro-abstinence message over the course of its five seasons. “To this day it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” Woodley said of reconciling the show’s conservative message with her own progressive beliefs.

In 2008, Woodley scored her first major role when she was cast as Amy Juergens, a 15-year-old girl who gets pregnant after having sex at band camp, in teen drama Secret Life of the American Teenager. “When I signed onto Secret Life, I read [three] episodes and I signed a contract for six years,” she told Bustle. “[Those episodes] all hit home. I had friends in high school who were pregnant. It felt like everything that I wanted to be sending into the world.”

However, Secret Life‘s message quickly began to shift after Woodley’s character had her child. Rather than adopting a progressive message of acceptance, the show treated Amy as a cautionary tale: her story was often contrasted with that of another character, Grace (Megan Park), who wore a purity ring and vowed to save herself for marriage.

“There were a lot of things that were written into the scripts that not just me, but a lot of the cast, disagreed with,” said Woodley of the show’s anti-sex plotlines. “There were belief systems that were pushed that were different than my own. Yet legally I was stuck there.”

Woodley added that this negative experience pushed her to seek more adult roles that better reflect her opinions. “Being on Secret Life propelled me to be more vocal about my own belief systems,” she told Bustle. Midway through the drama’s five-season run, she starred in The Descendants (2011) opposite George Clooney, in which she plays a teenager battling addiction. In 2013, the year Secret Life ended, Woodley appeared in coming-of-age dramedy The Spectacular Now, and the following year, she made her first appearance in the Divergent franchise and The Fault in Our Stars.

With these roles, Woodley was finally able to break free of Secret Life of the American Teenager. “I lost my virginity like seven times on screen!” she said. “I lost my own virginity in a really unromantic, unsexy way, [so] it’s very therapeutic for me that by playing these characters I was showing young women what they can wait for.”

Read Shailene Woodley’s entire interview with Bustle here.

Where to stream The Secret Life of the American Teenager