Big Little Lies Star Shailene Woodley Reacts To Backlash Over Reposting Melania Trump Letter

Shailene Woodley has spoken out about the controversy she found herself in after resharing an Instagram post from Melania Trump.

Back in July, the Big Little Lies star reposted an image of an open letter the former first lady had written in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Her decision to share Melania Trump’s message, aiming to highlight her husband’s “human” side, was met with a backlash, which Shailene was asked about during a new interview with Bustle.

“I read it and I was like, ‘This is so beautiful’,” she explained. “I was in circles of people that I deeply respect – friends, colleagues, progressive, very intelligent thinkers, shakers and movers – and many of them were saying, ‘He missed! Fucking assassin missed! Maybe it was a setup. Maybe it was a conspiracy’. I was going, ‘Have we forgotten that two human lives were taken?’ Two people died. That is sad. That is devastating.”

“I could not understand how people were speaking about something with such passion for death,” she continued.

Shailene added that she deliberately only posted the first page of Melania Trump’s letter, as the second was “more political” in nature.

“The first page was very much like, ‘Look, underneath the political mask is a man, a grandpa, who comes home to his children, his grandchildren, and plays music. The man underneath that mask is my husband’,” she said.

“I posted that letter because I thought it was a beautiful message of human compassion, and then I forgot about it because I have a life and I don’t live for what social media says. Then a week later, I got a text from a friend that said, ‘Are you OK?’.

“I Googled my name, because I’m like, ‘Oh fuck, what did I say?’. And of course, there were all these news articles about Melania Trump, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that is now this? Hundreds of articles because I posted about a woman saying she’s grateful her husband is alive? Really?’”

Shailene added that the ensuing furore “made me shake my head”.

“If [who I am] is not coming through in the way that I’m intending, I’m not going to participate on social media,” she insisted. “I participate in my own ways now that maybe are less public because I want to add to the right noise. I don’t want to add to unnecessary noise.”

“It’s sad to me that the minute we say one thing, we are immediately isolated from a large portion of our brothers and sisters in this country,” she continued.

“My beliefs are pretty well-known by the things that I have done publicly in the quote-unquote activist world. But until the noise is feeding what I want to feed – which is a world that feels safe and soft and truly inclusive – that [is something to work out] with my people behind closed doors.”

Best known for her role in Big Little Lies, Divergent and The Fault In Our Stars, Shailene has more recently appeared in the Golden Lion nominee Ferrari and the biographical drama Dumb Money and the TV series Three Women.

She’ll next be seen in action in the crime mystery Killer Heat and the documentary Hope in the Water.

Read her full interview in Bustle here.