Shailene Woodley hints at reason behind Aaron Rodgers split in rare quotes about ‘broken heart’
Shailene Woodley is seemingly giving insight into her and Aaron Rodgers’ breakup, two years after they called it quits.
The actress broached the topic while speaking to Bustle about starring in “Three Women,” which she filmed after she and the NFL player, 40, ended their engagement in 2022.
While telling the outlet about her “broken heart,” which had “healed and broke[n] again,” the “Big Little Lies” alum, 32, admitted to falling in love “over and over with unavailability.”
She explained, “I love easy and I care easy, but I do not love lightly, and I do not care lightly. It’s really taken me a lot of time to understand that it’s not on me to fix or heal or do anything about [a relationship] other than protect the deep care and love that I have for the world and for my people.
“Ultimately, that has helped me walk away without the need to understand why certain things didn’t play out the way that I may have desired them to,” Woodley continued.
The “Secret Lives of the American Teenager” alum noted that she is “not interested” in people who “cross” or “disrespect” her.
“I used to be a person who … would continue to give and give,” she said. “And now … I respectfully go, ‘Thank you so much for that information. Have a beautiful life. I wish you well.’”
The Emmy nominee began dating Rodgers in 2020, with the athlete breaking the news of their engagement.
Woodley broke her silence on the romance in 2021, joking to Jimmy Fallon that she didn’t think she’d end up with someone who “threw balls for a living.”
However, the former couple had called it quits by February of the following year.
Woodley called the breakup the “darkest, hardest time of [her] life” in a January 2023 interview with Net-A-Porter about filming “Three Women,” based off of Lisa Taddeo’s book of the same name.
She added, “My personal life was s–tty, so it felt like a big pain bubble for eight months. … I was so grateful that at least I could go to work and cry and process my emotions through my character.”
The Golden Globe nominee has not gone public with any subsequent romances since, while Rodgers reportedly began dating model Mallory Edens last year.
While Woodley gushed on Monday that she “want[s] to be a mom,” she clarified that she doesn’t “have expectations of life” and think it “should have happened by now.”
Instead, she said, “I want to cook someone dinner every night and travel the world with them and have pillow talk and celebrate their joys and their purpose and their destinies. … But I wake up every day and I say out loud, ‘I’m so excited for the magic and miracles that are going to happen.’”
