Charlize Theron: Stop 'the idea that women wilt and men turn into Bordeaux'

The social media off-to-school trend du jour is not so much kids standing on the doorstep in oversized uniform and a "please-get-this-over-with" grin, as … lunch boxes.

Perfect ones, of course, with carefully quarantined vegan delights, sandwiches shaped like teddy bears, carrots cut into hearts. And while Charlize Theron – the Oscar-winning actor and golden-haired goddess of Dior fragrance J'adore for 14 years and counting – may herself seem like the embodiment of perfection, she, too, has had enough.

"If I see one more Instagram blogger packing those incredible lunch boxes I'm going to kill myself," says the mother of two, pausing to yell at one of her giant rescue dogs to stop barking. "It's hard being a parent," she continues. "And I think that's something we don't talk about enough."

You don't need to spend long with the LA-based Charlize to get a feel for her attitude to life. There's no artifice, no pretence. "I've always had a real interest and thirst for brutal honesty about humanity and the world, and that has kicked into a new gear since I became a parent," the 43-year-old says. "I now want to explore those things even more. I want answers to make things better for them."

Despite a former life as a model, she is, and always has been, more interested in making sense of the messy underside of life than trying to skate on the Insta-perfect surface – a fact that makes total sense if you know about her childhood in South Africa (more of which later).

“I’ve always had a thirst for brutal honesty about humanity and the world, and that kicked into a new gear since I became a parent.”Credit: Getty Images

Perfection, to Charlize, is an illusion – and never more so than when it comes to parenthood. A single parent by choice (she adopted Jackson, 6, and August, 3, alone), she readily admits to accepting all the help she can get.

"I am very lucky to have a nanny and my mum lives 10 minutes away," she says. "And I have incredible aunts and uncles in my children's lives who are there for them and for me.

"Ultimately, I know that I'm a great mum when I'm in a good place. But there is such a stigma around the idea of [asking for] help, or not being able to do it all yourself, or do it perfectly. We have to destigmatise it and say there's no shame in that game."

Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003).Credit: AP

That no-shame, no-pretence mode of being is a thread that seems to run through Charlize's life. It's there in everything from her "non-existent" morning beauty routine ("I mean, listen, I've got two kids"), to her sweariness (she will happily reel off expletives in Afrikaans, her first language, on request), to the look on her face in the new J'adore campaign, when she leads a charge of women draped in shimmering gowns, slightly smirking, as if she's in on a joke that she's not going to share.

It is also there, of course, in her film choices. Her next one, for instance, is Fair and Balanced, arguably the first movie about #MeToo. In it, she plays real-life Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, one of many women who accused Fox's chairman, Roger Ailes, of sexually charged blackmail.

While Charlize's career may have begun with a series of what one critic described as "decorative roles", she has proved her depth – and thirst for darker parts. For 2003's Monster, the true story of homeless prostitute Aileen Wuornos, who shot dead her rapist and went on to kill eight more times, Charlize gained 13 kilos, wore filed-down false teeth and stage make-up that hid her china-doll complexion – and won an Oscar.

She transformed her body again for this year's Tully, in which she plays a woman exhausted after the birth of her third child (she gained 16 kilos this time). There's a scene where she takes off a stained T-shirt and slouches in a saggy nursing bra at the breakfast table.

"Mom, what's wrong with your body?" says her shocked on-screen daughter.

To the suggestion that she seems to be entirely lacking in vanity, Charlize is momentarily speechless, before relating a friend's reaction to seeing her in Tully. "When I was first telling him about it, he said, 'That sounds like a real vanity project,' " she recalls. "And then, when he saw it, he texted me and said, 'I love that a vanity project for you is getting fat and wearing sweatpants.' "

An unusually honest portrayal of parenthood, Tully, she says, wasn't so much about "pregnancy or just about post-partum depression" – pointing out that, as an adopter, she has experienced neither. "It was about how hard it is to be a mum, no matter how that baby came to you. Whether you adopt or have children through a surrogate, it doesn't matter – once that child is in your home, there's a challenge that comes with that.

"When I got the script, my little one was four months old and I was delirious. I was like, 'Yeah, I can completely relate to that.' I didn't have any experience of depression, but weirdly, as I was gaining the weight for the role, I actually became depressed for the first time in my life – I think because of the huge intake of sugar."

Staying fit, she says, is a pleasure. "I've never been a couch potato – I love to do yoga for an hour and a half. Not moving is not good for my head. "I dealt with depression for the whole shoot and afterwards, until my body kind of equalised itself," she adds.

"I have friends who have gone through post-partum depression, and in a weird way, my diet and how I changed physically for this role helped me feel, on a minute percentage, what it's like for your body not to feel like it's yours, to not feel like your head is yours."

Charlize Theron as an exhausted mother in this year’s Tully.Credit: AP

Adoption, she has always insisted, was her plan all along. It was a couple of years after her nine-year relationship with Irish actor Stuart Townsend ended in 2010 that Jackson, a black baby adopted from South Africa, came into her life. (She was also briefly engaged to Sean Penn in 2015.)

Adoption, Charlize feels, is still misunderstood. She bristles, for instance, at the notion of adopters being seen as doing something "good", as "saving" children, and at the idea that not looking like your child is somehow problematic.

"I think babies pick us as much as we pick them, so the idea that those packages are going to look exactly like you is such a myth. I believe that. The children ultimately find you."

As a multiracial family, Charlize and her children come in for some, at times, uncomfortable attention. "Someone was touching my kid's hair in the supermarket," she recounts, seething at the memory. "I mean, stop! You can't do that. How would you feel if I walked up to you and did that? People have good intentions, but they say the worst things. It's ignorance, a lack of knowledge. We have to start talking about it properly."

If you didn't know about her life before she arrived in Los Angeles, just shy of 19, with $400 and a suitcase so shabby it was held together with hairpins, you might be forgiven for thinking that hers was a fairly typical Hollywood story – the model-turned-actor who eventually made it.

Beauty, after all, opens a lot of doors, and modelling did indeed give her a leg up. After leaving her native South Africa at 16, working in Milan and Paris, she headed for New York, where she continued to model while also attending the prestigious Joffrey Ballet School in the hope of continuing the training she had begun at the age of four – a hope that was soon dashed when both of her knees "broke down".

With dancing no longer an option, acting became Charlize's goal. She was honest with the Los Angeles modelling agency she signed up with on her arrival in the city: she didn't want to be a supermodel, she just needed to pay for her $28-a-night motel. She took well-paid catalogue jobs in Germany, "crappy jobs that no model wanted to do because the clothes and photographs were so ugly", as she once described them.

Her acting break came when she was spotted by a talent manager while in a bank, "begging and pleading" with a teller to accept the last cheque she'd made from modelling.

Theron at the Oscars in February 2017. Credit: AP

The manager took her on, and the acting credits soon began to accrue as she climbed from a tiny, dubbed-over part in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest to roles opposite Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino in 1997's The Devil's Advocate, and Johnny Depp in 1999's The Astronaut's Wife. But none of these wife-and-girlfriend roles really showed what she was capable of.

Monster changed that. Director Patty Jenkins saw beyond the cheekbones, and wrote the role for her. "I thought, if she committed to this, she'd be completely committed – because I'd seen her committed to even bad parts," Jenkins said at the time. "She kept saying to me, 'Nobody comes to me with these kinds of parts.' "

Charlize not only committed, she waived her fee – and astonished an industry that had pigeonholed her. Critic Roger Ebert described it as "one of the great performances in the history of films", and it won her an Oscar, a Golden Globe and 17 other awards.

It wasn't until after the film's release that she spoke about her childhood. Charlize grew up as an only child on a farm 50 kilometres from Johannesburg, with her mother, Gerda, and father, Charles, a verbally abusive alcoholic.

At 13, she had left for a boarding school that specialised in the arts, and it was on a visit home when she was 15 that Charles came home drunk.

According to court testimony, he threatened to kill both Charlize and her mother, and fired his shotgun into Charlize's room. Gerda took her own gun and killed him. She was cleared of any charges, and for years Charlize didn't speak about the incident, lying that her father had died in a car accident, while her mother encouraged her to move on with her life.

"I think both of us have dealt with that night really well," she said last year. "We still have to deal with the life that we had, and that's what people don't realise. It's not just about what happened one night."

From early in her career, Charlize has campaigned to raise awareness of the high incidence of rape in her home country and started an HIV/ AIDS prevention charity, the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project. "South Africa taught me to be resilient," she says now. "It taught me at a young age that you have to buck up and get on with it."

After Monster, she started winning lead roles, like the female miner battling sexual harassment in North Country, which got her another Oscar nomination, and by 2006 she was on The Hollywood Reporter's list of highest-paid female actors. Even so, when Sony was hacked, revealing the disparity between male and female wages in Hollywood, she still found herself underpaid compared to male co-stars and reportedly used it to negotiate a $10-million pay hike for the 2016 film The Huntsman: Winter's War.

"I'm the first to acknowledge that I'm in an incredible place of luxury to be able to say to a studio, 'Listen, I want equal pay or I'm not making the movie,' " she says. "That's not the reality for a lot of women. The fight has to be bigger than that: we need legislation so women are protected."

She would be happy to see the term "anti-ageing" banned. "We get so used to certain words that we don't even think about them any more," she says. "We have to get past this idea that women wilt and men turn into the most beautiful Bordeaux. That needs to change – ultimately it's going to be up to us to do that."

While she does take care of herself, she admits that sometimes she wakes up feeling "like Superwoman – like, 'How am I getting this ageing thing so right?' And other days you're like, 'This is happening so fast, I don't know if I'm okay with it.'

"But all these things get easier when you change everything out there in the world that we see and hear. And if I can be part of that, to break that cycle, that's always my guideline."

Dior's new fragrance, J'adore Absolu, is available now.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale December 2.