Charlize Theron on her body’s most surprising asset
In a candid interview, the Hollywood powerhouse fires up about domestic violence, talks about her bond with Nicole Kidman and reveals the most unexpected compliment she has ever received.
Stellar
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Her peers have awarded her an Oscar. She is one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, and one of its most bankable.
She is a perennial on lists of the world’s most beautiful women. And she has been romantically linked to everybody from Sean Penn to Ryan Reynolds and, more recently if the rumours are true, Brad Pitt.
But Charlize Theron reckons one of the loveliest compliments she has ever received had to do with the physical power she possesses in a rather unlikely part of her body.
“I will never forget it,” Theron tells Stellar. “When I did Atomic Blonde, the trainer pointed out, ‘You have really strong elbows. Always punch with your elbow.’
It was just so lovely that someone looked at me and went, ‘OK, you’re not a man. You’re a woman. If you were to punch someone with your hand, you probably would break your bones.’ It changed my outlook. Now I want to tell all women: Don’t fight with your hands. Fight with your elbows.”
It is just past 7.30pm in Los Angeles, where Theron is based, and she is handing out martial arts tips down the phone to another woman clear across the globe in Australia – which is nothing if not on-brand for the 44-year-old.
When she landed her first clutch of movie roles in the mid-to-late-’90s, Theron was often lauded for her looks, but it didn’t take long before it became clear they were merely a smokescreen for immense talent and a steely determination to advocate for female empowerment and her own place in the world.
And if that dedication is admirable, it also informs her willingness to throw elbows when she sees fit. Take the radio interview she did with Howard Stern last month, in which she called out action mainstay Steven Seagal.
“You always come across that odd video of him ‘fighting’ in Japan, but he really isn’t,” she said. “He’s just incredibly overweight and pushing people… It’s a whole set-up. I have no problem talking sh*t about him because he’s not very nice to women.”
It is well-known that Theron pushes ahead to perform her own stunts – as she tells Stellar, “When you are putting yourself in a situation where you can’t fully commit or do something, the movie suffers from it.”
So when it came to filming The Old Guard, a new Netflix film from her production company in which she plays an axe-wielding mercenary, Theron was all in – and it came at a physical cost when she hurt herself as the movie still had five weeks’ worth of scenes to film.
But as a producer on the movie, she says, “It was absolutely impossible for me to investigate how bad the injury was. So I fought through… I had do to an entire fight over five days with a thumb that was torn off the bone.”
On top of that, she had a pinched nerve in her, yes, elbow. “So I basically lost all control of my hand. [And I was] shooting all this stuff riding a horse with a hand that had no function in it. It wasn’t until I was done with the film that I realised I needed three surgeries.”
The mishap threw into relief a lesson Theron learnt years ago on the set of 2005’s Aeon Flux, when she fell on her neck and herniated a disk. “It was pretty serious,” she says. “They had to shut the film down. It was really close to my spinal cord. I could have been paralysed.”
At the time, Theron was coming off that Oscar win for her full-scale physical transformation to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster, and had yet to stake a claim as one of film’s most reliable action stars, who has dazzled audiences in a string of blockbusters like Atomic Blonde, George Miller’s dystopian epic Mad Max: Fury Road and the eighth and soon-to-be-released ninth instalments of Fast & Furious.
She was also still years off from having children. But in that moment, she reckons, she became more keenly aware that playing make-believe can have some very real consequences.
“The injury was really eye-opening,” she says. “Especially [and even more so] when you have children. It’s like, wait a second... I want to be around for these things. What am I doing?”
The questions she was asking ultimately got answered when Theron decided that in future, she would not conform to the stereotypes others have around what constitutes an action star, or how she should play one.
“I don’t want to fit into someone else’s [notion] about what action looks like. I wanted someone to create what it looks like – with me,” she says. As a consequence, she believes the movies she has made since have improved.
“Listen, I’m never going to be Tom Cruise jumping out of buildings,” she cracks. “That’s not my strength; I have a fear of heights. But you build on the strength instead of trying to manufacture something out of weakness. Therefore, when I like to say I do all my stunts, it’s all based on my strengths.”
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Theron says her commitment is rubbing off on her children. While notoriously private when it comes to her family life, she recently shared a photo of her and Jackson on the set of Mad Max: Fury Road to mark five years since its release.
“I see the empowerment from them watching me on set fighting. Physically, my kids are so confident,” Theron says of her daughters (she adopted Jackson, eight, who is transgender, in 2012, and August, now four, in 2015).
“They have both decided they are going to join a martial arts studio and I think it’s great for whatever it turns out to be. All women should feel that they can take care of themselves. Which just means that you should feel confident in your body. Strength will make you feel more confident.”
Emboldening other women is critical to her story. She grew up on a farm outside Johannesburg, South Africa, in the ’70s and ’80s, and when she was 15, she witnessed her mother Gerda shoot her alcoholic father after he’d come home in a drunken rage; he died of his injuries.
Not long after, Theron, a keen ballet dancer, won a year’s modelling contract that took her to Milan and eventually America. While an injury put an end to her dreams of becoming a dancer, Hollywood lore has it she was discovered by an acting agent who saw her in the midst of an impassioned interaction with a bank teller.
She has worked steadily since, landing her first major role alongside Tom Hanks in 1996’s That Thing You Do!, but the trappings of movie stardom have never led Theron to try to gloss over her upbringing.
If anything, the spectre of domestic violence that shaped her childhood and the turmoil in her home country seems to inform both the breadth of gutsy roles she chooses, as well as the scope of her charity work.
“When I started in the world of philanthropy, my body had been marinating in the turmoil of growing up in South Africa. It’s impossible to come out of a country like that – with apartheid and a civil war almost breaking out – and not feel like you have to be part of the revolution.
I was raised in a country where I felt that my educational system lied to me about [its] history. The fire grew as I got older and started reading more and getting myself more informed.
Something happens when your brain grows and you question more and you find out people might have lied to you that… I don’t know. For myself, I really lean towards looking back. Why did we make the mistakes in the first place – and why can we not learn from them?”
In 2007, Theron started the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project to raise funds for grassroots organisations that work to empower youth in her home country. And the COVID-19 pandemic, she says, has only brought South Africa’s social issues more fully into the light.
“We reached out to the organisations through this crisis to say, ‘What do you guys need? How can we help?’ And the feedback we kept getting was that domestic violence and gender-based violence numbers were skyrocketing,” Theron says.
So in April, Theron started the Together for Her campaign to raise funds for domestic-violence shelters and community-based programs, and donated US$500,000 of her own money to the cause. “Creating enough resources and places for women and children to go is really important to me,” she says.
“When you think of what we are asking people to do – to stay home to protect them from a virus – really what we are asking a lot of people to do is to stay home with their abusers. It’s frightening and it’s devastating, and it makes me furious that it’s the world we are living in.”
Similar themes get explored in The Old Guard. The film, which is based on a graphic novel and also stars KiKi Layne and Chiwetel Ejiofor, tells the story of a group of mercenaries fighting century after century to make the world better, even as history keeps repeating itself.
While production wrapped well before a global pandemic and racial unrest in the US would come to define 2020 (thus far), Theron knew the story was topical.
“This is not the first time that we’ve experienced many of these things,” she points out. “This [Black Lives Matter] revolution has been around for a while. This epidemic is not the first. But we go through periods in our life where we find ourselves at the crossroads, thinking, ‘How did we get here?’ That’s the type of question I think the team in The Old Guard ask themselves.”
And this is not the first time that real life has so closely imitated Theron’s art – filming on Bombshell, the 2019 film in which Theron portrayed Fox News host Megyn Kelly, began a year on from the explosive Harvey Weinstein revelations that ultimately burst open the #MeToo movement.
“Bombshell was right at the height of sexual-abuse scandals. The timing couldn’t have been more accurate. It’s really strange to me,” Theron says. “This is back-to-back now.”
Theron earned her third Academy Award nomination for her performance in Bombshell, which also gave her the chance to work with Nicole Kidman for the first time. “Nicole is a warrior,” Theron says. “She is someone I’ve looked up to not only as an actress, but as a woman.”
Well before meeting Kidman, she says, the Australian actor served as something of a distant mentor. “Watching her navigate her narrative as she’s gone through the industry, she’s always done it with grace and dignity,” Theron says.
“She gave me hope that you could be graceful, and you could go through your life and have normalcy, but you could also deliver devastating work.”
Theron says she had been “dying” to work with Kidman for years, so when her production company started casting for Bombshell, she immediately sought her to play Gretchen Carlson. “She was one of my dream people I wanted to work with, and boy, she did not disappoint.
She came in as such a force as an actress, but she was [also] incredibly supportive of me as a producer. When things got really tough, she was really the one who constantly made me feel like 10,000 pounds were lifted off my shoulders,” Theron says.
“Nicole was a reminder that we, as women, just have to show up for each other. That’s all we have to do. It’s that simple.”
And that mission only grows more important to Theron every time she considers the two young women she is raising – and who are behind every decision she makes both on and off screen. “I fight to make this world better for my kids,” she says. “I don’t want to get emotional, but that is the thing that drives me.
There is some responsibility in us leaving something behind that’s better. As a parent, you feel that so strongly. I look at my girls every day and I say, ‘You know what? I’ve been given this great platform, and I’ve been so fortunate and so blessed, how do I make it better for them?’ I have to make it better for them.’”
The Old Guard is streaming now on Netflix.