The Fault in Our Stars Cast: "John Green is Voice of a Generation"

(Image credit: Digital Spy)

published 17 June 2014

Who is John Green? A crash course on The Fault in Our Stars author

As young-adult phenomena go, John Green's bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars was a somewhat unlikely candidate. Centring on the understated and doomed romance between two teenage cancer victims, it's a seemingly downbeat story with none of the genre trappings that have catapulted YA contemporaries like Twilight and The Hunger Games to success.

When Digital Spy sat down with the cast of Josh Boone's smart and heartfelt movie adaptation, we asked what it is about Green's novel that struck such a chord.

"It's like finding Salinger for the first time," said Laura Dern, who plays the mother of Shailene Woodley's terminal protagonist Hazel.

"John Green is not only the voice of a generation, particularly his narration that he writes for Hazel, but it's a voice for all generations, because the questions he's asking are so profoundly deep."

Ansel Elgort - who stars as Gus, Hazel's charismatic love interest whose own disease is now in remission - praised Woodley's ability to convey the equivalent of Green's emotionally complex prose without dialog.

Elgort, Dern and Nat Wolff also discussed where they fell on "the cry scale" when they saw the tearjerking film for the first time.

The Fault in Our Stars is released on June 19 in the UK.

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