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Theater|For Shailene Woodley, Every Day Is Christmas
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/theater/shailene-woodley-cult-of-love.html
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The actress is starring in the Broadway play “Cult of Love,” about a dysfunctional family gathered for the holidays. That means another month of caroling.
Jan. 2, 2025Updated 3:46 p.m. ET
“Christmas gifts are hard, man!” the actress Shailene Woodley said, with an expletive for emphasis. This was on a recent afternoon, just two days before Christmas, and Woodley (“Big Little Lies,” “Ferrari”) was striding around Union Square in Manhattan, in search of some last-minute presents. She had already warned her family that the gifts might arrive late this year.
“I told everyone Santa’s coming in January,” she said. “Sorry.”
Then again, Woodley began celebrating Christmas early this year. And she hasn’t stopped.
Woodley, 33, is starring on Broadway in “Cult of Love,” a fraught family drama written by Leslye Headland. The play, directed by Trip Cullman, spends a tense Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with the Dahl family, a Christian clan that takes their figgy pudding very seriously. Making her stage debut, Woodley plays Diana, the baby of the family, a young mother with the voice of an angel and powerful charismatic gifts. (Or possibly, psychosis.) Nearly every night and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays, through Feb. 2, Woodley dons holiday pajamas, sings carols and sits for slow-cooked lamb.
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Growing up outside Los Angeles, she began acting early — appearing in commercials at 5, booking episodic roles a few years later — but Woodley had never done live theater before. Up until a few years ago, she thought she never would. Public speaking (Woodley is an advocate for environmental causes) helped her overcome crippling stage fright, and Nicole Kidman, her co-star on the glossy HBO trauma soap “Big Little Lies,” convinced her that theater was a singular way to develop her craft. So when she switched to a new talent agency, she asked her representatives to find a play for her. The role of Diana intrigued her and the chance to act alongside Broadway veterans like Mare Winningham and David Rasche was an added gift.
Yet even among veteran actors Woodley holds her own.
“Woodley nails Diana’s mean-waif combustibility,” the New Yorker’s theater critic, Helen Shaw, wrote.
