Shailene Woodley still cries over ‘toxic’ Aaron Rodgers relationship

Shailene Woodley didn’t want to say much about Aaron Rodgers in a new interview, because, she said, reflecting on her relationship with the controversial NFL quarterback “always makes me cry.”

During an overnight camping trip in Malibu with a reporter for Outside magazine, the 33-year-old actor and environmentalist also said that her relationship with Rodgers, which reportedly began during the COVID-19 pandemic and ended in February 2022, “was not right.”

“But it was beautiful,” she added in the interview published Tuesday.

Later in the conversation, Woodley also alluded to how difficult the relationship became and how devastated she was when it ended. She and Rodgers reportedly began dating during the pandemic lockdown in July 2020, around the time he ended his two-year relationship with race car driver Danica Patrick. The revealed their engagement in 2021.

“I had a really awful, traumatic thing happen in early 2022,” Woodley told Outside later in the conversation. Yes, the “Divergent” star wasn’t being specific here about the “awful, traumatic thing,” but Outside noted that her engagement to the former Green Bay Packers quarterback was called off that February.

“I felt like I lost my soul, my self, my happiness, my joy,” Woodley said. “I really understood depression and anxiety and, like, complete soul detachment.”

Woodley also said she chose to remain in a “toxic situation” because she was empathizing with “someone else.”

“Empathy,” she says, “kind of kept me in this loop of feeling everything for everyone.”

For Outside magazine, the “Big Little Lies” actor was being profiled as the publication’s Outsider of the Year.

In a previous interview, Woodley opened up about “the darkest, hardest time in my life,” taking place in the fall of 2021, a time that coincided with the final months of her relationship with Rodgers and when he sparked national controversy by ranting critically about the COVID-19 vaccine.

In a 2023 interview with Net-A-Porter’s Porter magazine, Woodley talked about dating “somebody in America who was very, very famous,” without naming Rodgers. In the fall of 2021, she also was filming the series, “Three Women.” But she talked about how it was difficult to focus on her work.

“It was winter in New York, and my personal life was (expletive), so it felt like a big pain bubble for eight months,” Woodley said to Porter magazine. “I was so grateful that at least I could go to work and cry and process my emotions through my character,” Woodley said.

In early November 2021, Rodgers did serious damage to his public image as a popular NFL star by going on an angry anti-COVID vaccination rant on “The Pat McAfee Show.” The reigning Most Valuable Player was then accused of being an arrogant, narcissistic crackpot with a persecution complex after he claimed he was a victim of “the woke mob” and that the media had launched “a witch hunt” to pin him down on whether he had been vaccinated.

Unfortunately for Woodley, she was caught up in Rodgers’ controversy, mainly by coming to his defense in ways that were seen as tone-deaf, given that public health officials had raised serious concerns about the potential harm caused by Rodgers’ anti-vaccination statements in the midst of a global pandemic. Woodley took to social media to post snarky, expletive-laced and even sexually suggestive Instagram defenses of Rodgers.

Over the next month, one source close to Woodley and Rodgers told People that they were trying to make their relationship work, while another insider said that they “disagreed on a lot of things,” including politics, but that they tried to keep the peace by not debating those topics.

But the likelihood of a split became apparent when the Chico-reared Rodgers failed to thank Woodley or even mention her name when he won his third NFL MVP award in early February 2022.

Reports soon followed that they had ended their engagement. Rodgers then appeared again on “The Pat McAfee Show,” during which he said he didn’t regret speaking his mind about the COVID-19 vaccine, but said he regretted how those comments impacted his loved ones.

Rodgers, now the embattled quarterback for the losing New York Jets, then apologized directly to Woodley — or “Shai” — and others, saying he was “very sorry” for the blowback they encountered.

A year later, Woodley acknowledged to Porter that being in “a quote-unquote ‘famous’ relationship” became difficult.

“It honestly never really hit me that millions of people around the world were actually watching these things and paid attention to them,” she said. “I watched (the) scrutiny, opinions, the desire for people to know my life and his life and our life — it just felt violating in a way that, before, it was fun. I’m a very private person, and so I found that any time I posted anything, I instantly felt like I was sharing too much of who I am with people I didn’t necessarily trust.”