Against Type

Against Type
by Hilton Als



The former dancer and model Charlize Theron, who stands five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet, was in town recently to promote the new film “Monster,” in which she plays the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who was executed by lethal injection in 2002 for murdering seven men. The chance to play against type (as Wuornos, Theron wears oversized prosthetic teeth, brown contact lenses, and heavy makeup simulating freckles, sun damage, and a lifetime of booze) is what attracted Theron to the material. “I mean, I could have gone on forever—well, at least another ten years—as ‘that girl,’ ” Theron said over lunch. Dressed in dark trousers and a black V-necked sweater, and wearing a pendant around her long white neck, Theron, who is twenty-eight, was the very image of the roles she has played in the past, in such movies as “Reindeer Games” and “The Italian Job”: blond, intelligent, ambitious women capable of detonating a bomb at a moment’s notice. “But what’s the point of going on in those kinds of parts if it doesn’t mean anything?” she continued. “My cup was filled, but I had to turn it over and make everything spill out and look at the mess in order to make me different.” After ordering a Coke and a bowl of tomato soup, she tore off a corner of the Times and wrapped her gum in it. “I’m a real classy date,” she said.

“Honey, Aileen couldn’t get arrested,” Theron went on. “Wait. That came out weird. Of course she got arrested—a lot—but she couldn’t turn her life around. She was always trying to get away from prostitution. She tried to join the Army, but they wouldn’t take her because she was deaf in one ear. Still, she never lost her hope—her belief—that there was something better out there.” Though Wuornos dreamed of being a star of one sort or another, Theron didn’t; she grew up on a farm in Benoni, South Africa, where she spoke Afrikaans (“When I came to the States, I barely spoke English”) and studied ballet. “There weren’t a lot of movies out there,” Theron recalled. “So I danced. I remember this travelling circus would come through town, and I remember how much I loved how free the people looked, becoming someone else. All those feelings! And in a character! That looked like a pretty cool thing to me. So after I’d had fourteen broken toes and been taking eight hours of dance a day, my mom said, ‘You like to tell stories. Get out of here and tell them.’ So I jumped on a plane to L.A. I was eighteen years old. I didn’t know one soul. I worked as a model. I didn’t have a green card. Otherwise, I would have been a waitress.”

When Theron was fifteen, she saw her mother shoot and kill her father—an abusive drunk—in self-defense. “I think one of the reasons Patty”—Patty Jenkins, who wrote and directed “Monster”—“clicked with me and I with her is that we both grew up on our own, and fast,” Theron said. “No regrets. And never whine. What’s the point? Patty had such a hard time, wanting me to be in this film.You know, there’s money out there for true-crime movies—if you want to shoot them for a hundred thousand dollars in Romania, with Romanian actors. After I signed on, we could get a somewhat bigger budget. ‘Monster’ cost five million to make, plus we had to shoot it in four weeks. Poor Patty! People were, like, ‘You better not make Charlize Theron ugly!’ Fuck that. I didn’t work on Aileen from the outside in. After I read the writing she did in jail, she was in my body, and I was in hers.” Just then, Theron’s assistant arrived: she had a photo shoot to get to. When a lunch companion suggested that she might not want to take the Halle Berry route should she be nominated for an Oscar for “Monster,” and win—soul-searching performance followed by a turn as a Bond girl—Theron threw her head back and howled. She motioned to her assistant to write this down: “Note to self. Do not become Halle Berry.”