Shailene Woodley plays FBI agent Joanne Miller in Netflix’s UNABOMBER, but Joanne is not a real investigator from the case. Woodley explained the distinction in a new interview as the film arrived on Netflix on September 25. Her character brings several investigators’ experiences into one role.
What Woodley said about Joanne
“Joanne is an amalgamation of many detectives that worked on this case. She's a fictional character.”
Woodley made that point in an interview with Moviefone. She said she studied the case, spoke with investigators and watched material about criminal profiling before filming. What interested her most was how much time an investigator can spend thinking about one person and one case.
In the movie, Joanne wants the FBI to pay closer attention to the bomber’s manifesto. Woodley said Joanne sometimes follows an instinct that her male colleagues do not accept without hard proof. That is how the actor describes the character’s conflict in the film, not a claim about what happened inside the real FBI investigation.
Netflix has also published Woodley’s own explanation of Joanne’s job:
“She has to seek the truth — not her truth, not Ted’s truth, but the truth.”
The film moves between the hunt for the bomber and Ted Kaczynski’s younger years at Harvard. Woodley’s scenes are part of the investigation timeline, while Jacob Tremblay plays the young Kaczynski and Russell Crowe plays Harvard professor Henry Murray. Joanne is a fictional character in a drama inspired by real events; viewers should not mistake her scenes for a record of one real agent’s work.
Why she took the role
Woodley said director Janus Metz was one reason she accepted the film. She had liked his earlier work and wanted to see how he would put the Harvard story and the later investigation together. She also mentioned working with Alexander Ludwig, Marc Menchaca and Steven Ogg, who appear in Joanne’s side of the story.
Metz told Netflix that Joanne helps viewers follow the investigation and the questions the agents are asking. That gives Woodley a different job from Tremblay’s: she is playing someone trying to understand and stop the bomber, not someone explaining away his crimes.
UNABOMBER is streaming on Netflix. The Pixel Twelve movie page has the full cast, film details and more official images. The real bombing campaign killed three people and injured 23; the movie’s dramatized characters should be seen in that context.
