Charlize Theron

Charlize Theron
Women in Hollywood 2005

By Fred Schruers
Photographed by Gilles Bensimon

There was a respect for nature that I was taught at a very young age. It was just the three of us, and we were real farmers [in Benoni, South Africa]. We never bought from butchers or anything, and whatever we would do would last us a year. It was the circle of life, which I’ve always loved about farm life.

I think when you say “farmer” or “farm community,” you think of a naive, Daisy Duke kind of character. But you can come from that environment and have a great deal of culture and intelligence. It wasn’t like I sat in on every conversation, but we read newspapers and knew what was going on in the world.

I always felt like I had a partnership with my mother, and that I never had to rebel against anything. There was a certain amount of responsibility that was given to me as a gift: “You’re smart, use that; be your own person, go explore, go and live a complete, full life.”

And there was a certain amount of discipline that came with the way I was raised. You didn’t break things that were not yours; you didn’t wreck a room. My mom and I watch this Nanny 911 show together, and I said to her, “I’m so calling the authorities on you for how you raised me.” Then I think about it and I’ve just got to say, there was a boundary that always made me feel safe. I really always knew from a very, very early age—that’s wrong and don’t you ever do that again. And God, I was spanked. I was more than spanked—I was whipped. Definitely. [With] whatever was around.

I went to school one time with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse engraved in welts on my thighs from a hanger that my mom grabbed that had all these little Disney cartoons cut out in it. It boiled down to respect—my mom was taking care of everything and running a business at the same time and there were never any nannies or anything like that. She was doing laundry and cooking three meals a day and—I remember it so vividly, I came home from school, and she said, “Change your uniform before you have lunch.” And I was like, “Oh, I’ll just take a quick bite of this tomato soup.” And I drizzled it all over. She was busy ironing, and she had all the hangers stacked up. It was so quick—a couple of swipes on the thighs. I remember going to school and showing off my war wounds to my friends.

I think that that’s different than beating a child, which shouldn’t happen, or spanking a child unnecessarily. But let me tell you, at that age I knew I was wrong—because I was for sure not washing my own clothes; my mom was doing that. Then look at the relationship I have with her today. That’s a testament for my whole argument right there.

[When Theron was 15, her mother shot and killed her father, who was physically threatening them.] It’s really fascinating to see what people will do when they have to make a split-second decision that could change everything in their lives. You start to realize that you were just really blessed and lucky to have somebody like my mom who made that decision, and it did save our lives. But it happens all the time, and it just depends on where you are in your life. And how much you’re willing to fight to live.

When I did the promotion for Monster, everybody was saying, “I can’t imagine. . . . ” And I was thinking, “Really? Really, if you were in those circumstances, you can’t imagine?” It’s so hard for people to see themselves doing something as horrible as [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos did. It’s so easy for us to say, “Oh, God, I can’t imagine.” But if you do imagine it and get yourself to that place, I think anybody is capable of doing anything. And capable of surviving anything.

I think all of your experiences mold you into the person that you are. It would just be naive to think that my life didn’t imprint emotionally how I shuffle the cards in emotional situations in my future. I never wanted something like that to happen in my life. It’s not something that I hang on to; it’s something that obviously is there, that I in my own way of therapy, through my work, have dealt with and stayed healthy about. But it’s not something that controls or haunts my life.

I read a really interesting book called I Have Life: Alison’s Journey about a woman in South Africa [who survived a rape and a brutal stabbing attack]. She said, “Now that you’ve been given this gift of life, you’ve got to go and live it. You can’t sit in the past and stay there.” And so for me and my mom, it’s been tough because at the same time we were trying to move on, we always have to still deal with it. I gave my mom the script of Monster to read. She called me back and said, “I absolutely think that this is such a heartbreaking story. So fascinating, such a great tale of human nature.” And that was what we talked about. We’ve really moved on in our lives.

When I think about the life that I went about living from the age of sixteen to nineteen or twenty, I don’t know if I could do it again. It was basically like backpacking. [Theron, who was studying ballet, also started modeling as a teenager; her work took her to Europe and New York City.] I had the same suitcase that entire time with the same clothes, and I just went from one country to another, never knowing where I was going to end up. For me, it was all about, I’ve been given this chance to see the world. At that age, you just kind of think, well, it’s going to work out. When my career as a dancer ended, I had to look into why I liked it so much. And it was really bottom-line storytelling; I wanted to tell stories. Acting just seemed like another natural venue for that.

[The cheap motel she checked into when she first moved to Los Angeles] was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed. I was like, “Look, I can see the Hollywood sign”—that’s all I cared about. And I think that’s why today I’m such a sheet snob, because for years I had to sleep on horrible, dirty sheets.

I knew early on that there’s a thing called typecasting. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to grow as an actor—to get some versatility in there. I know for a fact that on my deathbed That Thing You Do! will be one of my fondest memories. All of it—the kids that [Tom Hanks] chose, all of us together, and with him at the helm being such a friend to us.

The whole process of [getting her breakthrough role in Devil’s Advocate] was one of hell—no pun intended. I remember traveling to New York several times, sometimes on my own dime, to screen-test. I read [in L.A.] with Keanu Reeves, like, five times, and then they started screen-testing, like, ten actresses. Then they had to re–screen-test all of us. It was three months, [and I thought], “If I go through all of this and don’t get this film, I’d better be walking away with some immense [new] strength.”

So when I got it, I still felt like, “Oh my God, I’d better not screw up because they’ll just fire me and get one of those other girls!” You’re not just on your toes, you’re hanging from a very thin wire and you’d better not let go. But then it was great because it was working with amazing people like Taylor Hackford and Al Pacino and Keanu—people who force you to stay at a certain place. Pacino was in the process of editing Looking for Richard at the time, and he was doing a play. It was like, “Could you do any more? Are you baking cookies too?”

Acting is easy when you work with somebody who considers you a partner. Then it’s a joy. Some directors are really good at that partnership, and others are not. Part of why I love this job so much is because it is collaborative—you enter a world and everybody’s involved; it’s not just about you and it’s not just about the director. When I find myself in a situation where that nest is really small and only this selected few are allowed in there, I don’t function very well.

Reindeer Games was a great example of choosing a film purely because of the director, John Frankenheimer. I think that he was just an incredible filmmaker; The Manchurian Candidate to me was a perfect film. Anyway, I did that movie because I really wanted to work with him. And sometimes that’s not enough.

The Yards was probably one of the hardest films for me emotionally, and James Gray is very much that director who just will not stop until he knows that he’s pushed you to the ultimate—almost right over the edge. Which is what you want, but at the same time, it was emotionally a very difficult film to make. He doesn’t leave anything untouched. You’re basically shoveling out your innards.

The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story, one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it, they get criticized. When you do something like Monster or what Nicole Kidman did [in The Hours] or what Halle Berry did [in Monster’s Ball], then all of a sudden people go, “Well, that’s just a trick to win an Oscar.” But what people forget is that that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves. I think Johnny Depp said it really well: “If you serve roast beef constantly, you get bored.” I’m a fan of brave actors who can celebrate that—Sean Penn is one of them, and Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.

With Aileen Wuornos, it was actually very simple. She was somebody who was five three but couldn’t show that she was five three and a woman on the street. It’s funny, but about a month before I said yes to the film, I went to the aquarium in Long Beach, and it was incredible to watch blowfish [expand]. And there was a blowfish aspect about Aileen—her entire life she had to kind of make sure that people knew she was there, not to mess with her.

Aileen didn’t have the luxury of being emotional—to sit in a back alley to cry about her life. For an entire month, I was playing somebody who held onto those things so deep and so hard. And then all of a sudden, in the last week, I had to show emotion. To break through that wall really took some time. I remember it started to rain and everybody was kind of packing up, and I sat in the alley with my manager and good friend, J.J. Harris, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I had an uncontrollably emotional leak for Aileen.

[After wrapping Monster] I had to go and do Head in the Clouds [opposite her boyfriend, Stuart Townsend], which I was really happy about because it disciplined me to actually let go [of Aileen]. Whereas if I’d come home, I would have really taken my time, I think, before I said goodbye to that completely. But even though I showed up in Montreal and I was like, “Oh, everything’s great,” I didn’t understand why I was drawing the curtains and I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was depressed. It was good to be around somebody who knew me. So that [I knew] I wasn’t losing my mind—somebody who could say, “You just had a really intense experience, and it’s going to take some time, and that’s okay.”

Even when [it seemed that no one wanted to distribute Monster], we didn’t go, “Well, maybe it’s a piece of shit.” Maybe sometimes we did—depending on the hour. But we did somehow believe that we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t make the cuts everybody was suggesting to water it down.

I don’t think [Monster director Patty Jenkins and I] ever really [congratulated each other on the film’s success]. Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve been like, “Are you serious?” Even when I was holding an Oscar and I looked at her, we were like, “How did this happen?” We knew when we were working on the movie that no matter what, even if it went straight to video, it was something special for us. We just didn’t know how many other people would think that it was special.

I watch movies and I love to see how people decided to say a specific line or how much to give in an emotional statement. There’s never a right or wrong answer, and it’s great to go to work and have the freedom to throw those kinds of human possibilities around. And as a storyteller, to actually think, how much do you want to give away right now? Acting really is like a big poker game, isn’t it? When do you show your cards? Because we don’t want to know everything up front, do we?

My favorite kind of rehearsal is where you’re obsessively talking about the story a month or two months prior to shooting the film. Where you’re not necessarily doing scenes, but there’s a constant communication about this world—I’m talking about stuff that’s not even in the story—so that there’s an understanding of where all of this takes place. Because then the subconscious can take over.

On Aeon Flux [a sci-fi adventure due in December, in which Theron plays the 25th-century assassin of the title], we had a lot of those kind of rehearsals. Then we shot for nine days and I had the injury—I slipped doing a back handspring and landed on my neck—and we had seven weeks off, which was a really great time for me to do a lot of internal work.

[When I hurt myself], I had already trained for five months so it wasn’t the first time I’d felt some severe pain. I lay down for a second and I thought, it’s a spasm and it will go away. And it just got worse. Our medic said, “We should have an X-ray and really make sure.” An hour later I lost all feeling in my hands and feet, and I kind of thought, that’s probably not good.

Even after I knew that it was a herniated disk, I took four days off. I was in the hospital for three days getting all these treatments, and then I just didn’t want to give into it. Six days later I went back to work; I had the brace on and I thought, “We’ll just do all the acting stuff. I’ll wear the brace in between takes.” I really couldn’t move my neck. Then I was on set for two hours and I lost all sensation in the right side of my body and that’s when we did some neurological tests. There was a lot of nerve damage. I talked to my doctor in L.A. and he really put things in perspective for me: (a) you’re lucky, because the disk didn’t slip far enough to touch or compress your spinal cord, but (b) you have to know that if you have any bad bump, that disk just needs to move two millimeters and you could be paralyzed. I went, okay, I have to come home and heal from that.

[Shooting Aeon Flux] was such an out-of-body experience. It was the biggest movie in every sense that I’ve ever tried to tackle. And it was completely foreign to me. A friend of mine who educated me on the whole Aeon world [the film is adapted from a 1990s MTV animated series], told me that she went onto the website and that the fans are a little bit disappointed that I’m not wearing the original outfit. And I thought, how could a human actually wear that—and shoot in it? I mean, it was a cartoon! Seriously, it would be an NC-17 film—what she had was a couple of strings and a patch of fabric. We had a really great costume designer who understood how far to celebrate the original, but with something that we knew that I could do a lot of the stunts in without strangling myself. And exposing all my bits.

Even in the original, Aeon’s a very dark girl, and in every way. Her dominatrix aspect is a quality of someone who’s tired of being looked upon as just a woman who should listen and do as the government says. And she uses everything in her body to fight that. I’m going to be completely honest: If I had a choice between seeing a great dramatic film versus something that has science fiction in it, I’d probably go and see the dramatic film. I grew up watching Kramer vs. Kramer or Sophie’s Choice versus [seeing] Star Wars. It’s like a gap—I always think of it that way, like there was a giant generation gap by the time things came to us in South Africa. I just didn’t grow up with those kind of films, and I think it left a mark on me somehow. The funny thing is, when I am forced to go and see them with a friend or something, I actually quite enjoy them.

I was in production for almost a year with Aeon Flux and then went straight into North Country [a drama, directed by Whale Rider’s Niki Caro, based on a true story about a Minnesota miner who in the early ’90s filed a class-action sexual harassment suit against her male coworkers]. What I love about the film is that it’s about a community, its social structure, and its people. And as Niki said, it happened in their community but it could have happened, and did, anywhere. Everywhere. You kind of find yourself in the middle, going, who do you really stand with? Sure, women should have the right to work here, but at the same time these men have families to feed. That kind of struggle is always interesting.

By the time Josie [Theron’s character] got to the mine, the women working there had become numbed to [the harassment]—that was partly why they didn’t side with her. They didn’t even think it was wrong anymore. They just dealt with it. Josie wasn’t a superstrong character; she wasn’t one of these women who walk into a room and own it. That’s why it was so fascinating that she ended up standing up against all of these people.

There are stories out there that I really feel should be told. I started a production company [Denver & Delilah Films—named after her two dogs], and it wasn’t like, “Oh, I just want to develop things for myself.” If something came along that was right for me . . . but at the end of the day, it’s just things that I’m interested in. We’re in postproduction right now on Our Song, a documentary about the Cuban hip-hop movement. I think people don’t know that this kind of alternative lifestyle exists in Cuba—it’s the youth movement, the future of Cuba, people trying to change their society. We tried to veer away from being too politically heavy, because these kids rap about these things. You don’t have to underline anything. And we’re in development on the life story of the late Edward Bunker, a crime novelist, a great character actor—he was Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs—and a [criminal]. He was, like, seventeen when he went to San Quentin. He was deemed to be a lost cause, and he found himself, and found an art form to express himself. It’s just a great redemption story.

We have another project, Ice at the Bottom of the World, that I bought the rights to about six years ago. The author, Mark Richard, wrote the script. It’s about a family reuniting in a very witty and unsentimental way—but very hard-hitting; it deals with euthanasia. So hopefully that will be my next thing, and after that, we’ll see. I can’t plan that far ahead.

It is really important to stop sometimes and go and live life a little bit, just to have something to draw from. I’m at that place right now where I feel I’ve kind of emptied my resources. There’s a giant world out there, and I sure want to see it all. I live with a man [Townsend] who’s a traveler at heart; we both just love throwing some backpacks together and really living life in whatever situation we find ourselves in.

I’ve been very blessed. I could never get jaded or blasé about that. I know I’ve been extremely lucky. I also feel like I have been given this great gift, which is what pushes me to not just take it for granted. It’s really given me this kind of hunger to go and challenge myself to be even better at it.