Shailene Woodley suspects she left a bruise on Sterling K. Brown’s arm during the birth scene in episode 4 of “Paradise.” She was gripping him through the delivery, willing her breath to leave her body, as though she was actually taking her last one. Woodley didn’t even see Brown’s face at that moment, only catching it later while watching the finished episode at home in a puddle of tears.
“I felt like if I were, in that moment, to die, it would be OK, because Sterling had my back,” she tells Variety. “It was a raw, honest exchange.”
That scene was the culmination of a guest arc Woodley built in less than 10 days with barely a completed script in hand. She had just come off five months on Broadway when her agent called with a message from creator Dan Fogelman, who wanted to discuss a role in Season 2.
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By the time it ended, she was booking a flight to Los Angeles. Fogelman was upfront: Woodley’s character, Annie Clay, a former medical student turned Graceland tour guide, would fall for a fellow survivor, Link (Thomas Doherty), become pregnant and die during childbirth. “I was like, Dan! Oh, my God,” Woodley laughs.
The lack of preparation, counterintuitively, may be exactly why the performance works as well as it does. Five months of live theater had taught her something she had been told since childhood: slow down.
“Because of the play, there was this slowness ingrained in me,” she says. “There was a calmness and steadiness in being all right with taking that time. The directors gave it to me.”
The Season 2 premiere, “Graceland,” revolves entirely around Annie, tracing her life from the day the disaster drove the Season 1 cast underground, through the years she spent surviving above it, alone, asking audiences to abandon familiar characters and invest in someone new. Woodley built Annie’s interior life largely in silence, on a replica Graceland set, wandering the rooms during lunch breaks and asking herself what a woman would actually do during two years of total isolation. She invented scenes of Annie talking to the Elvis portrait on the wall, imagining she had started to believe he was real. Most of it never made the final cut, but it subtly informed everything that did.
“Annie is very practical, very linear, very type-A, versus me, who would have been kooky and overly emotional. Fear wasn’t making her cry,” Woodley says. “Sitting in those rooms, staring at those walls and asking myself what I would do, that was more so how I crafted her.”
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For the birth scene, director Ken Olin gave Woodley and Brown room to find the moment rather than execute something predetermined, and several of the women hired as midwives were real nurses; one was a doula. For the kind of actor Brown is, Woodley reaches for a word borrowed from fellow actor Ben Foster: beast.
“There are people who are unafraid to look a certain way, sound a certain way, be a certain way, and it’s what really transcends a screen,” she says. “Sterling K. Brown is a beast.”
At its core, Annie’s story is about a woman who spent years confusing control with safety, and what happens when love makes that bargain impossible. “This baby helped Annie finally face her deepest fear,” Woodley says. “And by virtue of facing her fear, she gave her baby a chance at life.” She pauses. “I really do believe that we all help each other, and sometimes it can look tricky or trivial, the way that help shows itself.”
As for whether Annie might return for Season 3 through one of the show’s many flashbacks, Woodley’s answer is immediate: “Of course I would want to go back. Someone give me the call.”