Shailene Woodley shocks Comic-Con crowd in surprise first appearance with 'Paradise 'cast

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7 days ago

EW exclusively broke the news of Woodley's casting in the apocalyptic Hulu thriller, which also stars Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden.
Paradise isn't ready for Annie.
The crowd at Saturday's San Diego Comic-Con 2025 panel for the new Hulu apocalyptic political thriller Paradise broke into uproarious cheers when creator Dan Fogelman and star/executive producer Sterling K. Brown welcomed a surprise guest onto the stage. Shailene Woodley, making her first return to Comic-Con in nearly a decade, strode in to a proper hero's welcome, embracing her costar and showrunner for the first time since her season 2 casting was exclusively announced by Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday.
EW Editorial Director Gerrad Hall, who served as the panel's moderator, had just introduced a never-before-seen preview clip of the first episode of Paradise's upcoming second season. Titled "Graceland" and focused exclusively on Woodley's Annie, the episode flashes back to the moments before the extinction-level cataclysm that drove the characters played by Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson underground and into the city-sized "Paradise" bunker.
Fogelman explained that Woodley "'just saw" the "Graceland" clip "for the first time. She hadn't seen it yet." Woodley appeared overwhelmed her own character's predicament, saying, "I'm sweating! I did it and I'm sweating! That was crazy!"
Woodley shared that it's "really exciting to be back" at Comic-Con. "It's been a long time. It's almost been a decade. Comic-Con still going strong!"
The 33-year-old Big Little Lies star was a centerpiece of the Comic-Con schedule in the mid-2010s, when she was anchoring the Divergent film franchise. Her last appearance at the annual celebration of all things entertainment and fan culture came in 2016, when she traveled to San Diego to promote the biopic Snowden with costar Joseph Gordon Levitt, director Oliver Stone, and the whistleblower himself, who appeared via Zoom.
The first few minutes of the episode show Woodley's Annie working as a tour guide at the famed Memphis home of Elvis Presley when disaster strikes. Phones start pinging with alarming news alerts, lights start flickering, and panic strikes. Annie and her coworker gather what supplies they can quickly grab and hole up in a secure bunker, hoping to weather an unfathomably large wall of advancing clouds and crashing rush of water.
"The first episode introduces this new character that Shai plays. It's hard to talk about without giving away too much, but it is a real tour de force," Fogelman said. "A performance tour de force, and I don't say that lightly. She hasn't seen it yet but everyone backstage is already coming up to her and telling her."
Woodley revealed she was "such a big fan" of the show's first season, and after a great introductory call with Fogelman, was delighted as she was shocked to learn that she hadn't only a landed a role in the follow-up season, but that she'd need to "travel in three days and you start filming in five or seven. It was a really fast turnaround."
Paradise's stars and creator kept mum about what becomes of Annie following the disaster, but with Brown's Xavier Collins ending season 1 with a journey to exit the bunker and emerge topside for the first time since mankind as he once knew it was wiped out, there's high potential he may eventually run across Annie.
"They eventually will meet," Fogelman confirmed. "But Shai's character lived in the world before, and so, I'm not going to say which characters will interact with her in the world, but eventually at some point, Sterling and her... we have filmed that. They've done scenes together."Brown told EW on Tuesday that fans can expect to "see how people have been surviving that didn't have the means and the planning that the people inside the bunker did" in season 2. "They've made a way. It doesn't look as organized, obviously, but it is a way. We meet people who are benign. We meet people who are nefarious."
He also joined Fogelman in the chorus of praise for Woodley, remarking, "I made a friend, that's really the biggest thing. It's always great when you hire wonderful people that are good at what they do, but when you actually make a friend that's even cooler. She's sweet, honest, open, ready to play, and very professional. I expected all of those things of her. But to have met her and to have played with her in the sandbox, it was everything and more. She's outstanding."
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