The man may be the big movie star, but the women in "The Descendants" have acquitted themselves pretty well, too.
Alongside George Clooney in Alexander Payne's deft awards contender about a Hawaiian landowner who discovers his comatose wife had been cheating on him, 20-year-old Shailene Woodley and 11-year-old Amara Miller take major roles as Clooney's daughters.
Judy Greer, meanwhile, makes the most of a handful of scenes in the second half of the film, while Patricia Hastie has won unamimous praise from Clooney for a thankless role as the wife, which required her to lay in a bed unconscious for nearly every moment of her screen time.
When it comes to the Oscar Supporting Actress race, Woodley is almost a shoo-in and Greer a longshot. But with far different amounts of screen time, both supply indelible moments in the film: Woodley in a wordless scene in which her character sinks under the water in her family's swimming pool to deal with the grief of learning about the true severity of her mother's condition, and Greer in an alternately funny and heartbreaking scene in which she comes to the hospital to see the woman with whom her husband was having an affair.
(Woodley and Greer at TheWrap Screening Series; photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images)
When TheWrap spoke separately to Woodley and Greer, both mentioned that at the cast's first table read, Payne told the assembled actors that he hired them for who they were and what they did in their auditions, and that he simply wanted them to be themselves and not worry about acting.
Shailene Woodley: It's Easy-Peasy
It was messy. That's what Shailene Woodley liked about the script to "The Descendants," and about Alexandra, a rebellious teen with past substance-abuse problems who has to break the news to her dad that his wife had been cheating on him.
"So often I read scripts that are beautified or glamorized or artistically licensed," said Woodley, who stars in the ABC Family series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." "This one was messy, and I fell in love with the realness and humanness and rawness of it."
But if you think the young actress must have been excited to work with Alexander Payne, think again. It turns out that she didn't even know who the "Sideways" and "About Schmidt" director was.
"I'm very uneducated in this industry," she said. "I don’t know directors or good films or producers, or awards for that matter. I had never even seen 'The Graduate' or heard of 'The Godfather' before I worked with Alexander."
But how do you grow up in Los Angeles, work as an actress from the age of 5, and not have more awareness of the industry and movies?
"I just never really cared about it, and I'm still kind of the same way," she said. "I love the art of acting, and that's it.
