Charlize Theron on overcoming her monsters
As a teenager, she heard her mother shoot her father. She went on to win an Oscar playing a serial killer. Charlize Theron reveals the story behind her rise to Hollywood fame
Dressed in jeans, a low-cut top and heels – her nod to her star status being the obligatory pair of oversized designer shades – she apologises in advance. A transatlantic flight has seen to it that she’s suffering from jetlag. “This is the hour that really gets you,” she says, flinging a window open in the hope a gust of wind might revive her. Not that she’s going to let a little thing like tiredness creep into our encounter: after 13 years in the business, in which time she’s garnered two Oscar nominations and one win, the statuesque South African is too much of a pro for that.
Dazzling to look at (even when she’s sleepy), what’s heartening is that she’s also straightforward when you meet, as we’ve done on a number of occasions over the years from Cannes to the Venice film festivals and more recently in London. Far removed from the uninspiring women she began her career playing before winning an Oscar for 2003’s Monster, she claims she’s in a constant state of evolution. “There are certain qualities I still have from when I was six years old,” she says, now 33. “I like that about myself and I try and stay true to those because that’s the core of me as a human being. I celebrate growing as a person every single day of my life. I try and do that as much as possible. But the core of me, to be honest, is exactly the same as it was. I’m still a farm girl.”
Raised on a homestead in Benoni, just outside of Johannesburg, where her father, Charles, ran a road construction business, Theron’s early life was blissful. A “hyperactive” child, her mother Gerda “threw her into the arts” when she was young, whether it was studying ballet or taking ice-skating lessons. “I did everything possible just to keep my mind busy,” she says. Yet it’s not this for which her upbringing is remembered. Tragedy struck when she was 15, when she heard her mother shoot her father dead after he went on an armed, drunken rampage through the family home.
Theron says it was the defining event of her life, but she claims to have drawn on it in a positive manner. “[Very early] I knew the value of life and I knew how quickly it could be taken away,” she says. Leaving South Africa after winning a local modelling contest, she spent a year in Milan striding down catwalks with those stunning legs of hers before heading to New York. Desperate to pursue a childhood dream, she joined the prestigious Joffrey Ballet Company, only for further tragedy to strike, when a knee injury dashed her hopes of being a dancer. Switching tack, she headed straight to Hollywood, after her mother bought her a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.
Eight months later, her luck turned. Comically, it was when she threw a hissy fit in a bank queue after a teller refused to cash a cheque. She was overheard by legendary agent John Crosby, who gave her his card. Within months she was cast as the silver catsuit-wearing vixen in thriller 2 Days In The Valley. Still, while her blonde locks and lithe limbs ensured she was never short of work, she was too often pigeonholed, playing eye-candy in films like The Devil’s Advocate and The Astronaut’s Wife. She admits she had something to prove back then. “In my twenties, I had to walk into the room like a cannonball! I don’t do that today. But that hunger is still there to do something that is intriguing.”
Her latest attempt to do this is The Burning Plain. The directorial debut of Guillermo Arriaga, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Babel and 21 Grams, Theron plays Sylvia, a chic restaurant manager in Oregon who, it’s gradually revealed, is a self-loathing sex addict. It’s not the first time she’s dealt with the darker side of sex. In North Country, which afforded her a second Oscar nomination, she played the victim of sexual discrimination, while her take on Britt Ekland in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers didn’t flinch from examining the starlet’s abusive relationship with the titular comedian.
Still, neither character compares to the hollow shell of a woman she plays in Arriaga’s melodrama. While Sylvia holds a guilty secret from her past, which is only revealed through a complex series of flashbacks, Theron carries off the role with great dignity, her body language pregnant with pain in every scene. It’s emotionally exhausting to watch; I ask whether she found it a hard role to play. “Look – it’s hard for me to use the word ‘hard’ for anything,” she says. “Because guess what? I’m not lugging steel or rocks out of a mine, and I’m not working construction. That’s hard. You have obstacles and some days are really hard but it actually…” She tails off, point made.
For Theron, the film was also another chance to explore a different side to her: that of producer. Unlike most Hollywood stars, her production company Denver and Delilah Films (named after her two cocker spaniels) is no protracted vanity project. Rather, she seems intent on producing films she cares about. First there was Monster, then the credible Cuban hip-hop documentary East of Havana and more recently, the family drama Sleepwalking. “You know, 10 years ago, I never knew I would be a producer. I didn’t have that interest,” she says. It was coming into contact with producers that sparked her interest. “I went, ‘What is happening to this industry? How does it work?’ Through that fascination, I learned and I felt, ‘I can do this. I can produce.’”
As an executive producer on The Burning Plain – usually a credit given to financiers who have little creative input – Theron was anything but a silent partner. Calling her “a brilliant, intelligent and charming woman,” Arriaga testifies to this. “It’s beautiful to fight with her,” he grins. “She was very committed to the film.” Theron recommended to Arriaga the costume designer Cindy Evans, whom she’d worked with on North Country, and, more importantly, suggested Kim Basinger for the role of Sylvia’s mother. While they had never worked together before (and don’t share scenes here), it’s evident Theron sees something of herself in Basinger. After all, both women began their careers as the bombshell-for-hire in blockbuster fodder before gaining critical respect (Basinger winning an Oscar for LA Confidential).
“There’s something about Kim,” says Theron. “There’s a strength – especially now at her age, more than when she was working in her thirties – with this leftover vulnerability from her twenties that’s just unbelievably beautiful to watch. And you can’t manufacture that. There are moments on screen when she’s shaking, her entire body is shaking for real. You can’t fake that.” It’s almost as if Theron is talking about herself: at her best, the South African offers a mixture of strength and vulnerability on celluloid that suggests she can now be thought of alongside peers Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett as one of the finest actresses of her generation.
Much of this stems from her performance as real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. With the help of 30lbs in weight, prosthetics and fake teeth, Theron immersed herself so thoroughly in the role it rightly earned her comparisons to Robert De Niro’s work in Raging Bull. The subsequent Oscar win was a foregone conclusion, though Theron denies this. “You can’t go into it with this fantasy idea that you’re going to come home with the Oscar. You’re going to a party, someone’s going to give you a really nice dress, the champagne is free… those are the only guarantees. And hopefully your boyfriend will go home with you.”
Inevitably she made the almost obligatory post-Oscar misstep that afflicts most actresses (Halle Berry, anyone?), following Monster with the disastrous sci-fi movie Aeon Flux. But overnight, Hollywood saw Theron in a new light – though this was not, she notes, due to the Oscar itself. “I think playing Aileen Wuornos changed my career. Winning the Academy Award is great, and it means great things for the studios and box office. I’m not belittling it. But I think that even if I didn’t win or get nominated, and that movie had gone straight to DVD, directors would’ve watched that work. It would’ve definitely changed opinions.”
While she’s not adverse to the occasional blockbuster, such as last year’s hit Will Smith vehicle Hancock, everything about Theron now suggests an earnest desire to be taken seriously. Outside of her acting, she has been a rape crisis campaigner in South Africa for 11 years, and was recently recruited by Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, to be an official Messenger of Peace in the region. Although she gained American citizenship in 2007 (and has dual passports) she claims she’s still very tied to her homeland. “All of my actor friends have gone to South Africa to do a film. I never have but I’d love to!”
Still based in Los Angeles, Theron lives with her partner, Irish actor Stuart Townsend. They have been together since meeting on 2002 thriller Trapped, and subsequently worked on World War II romantic drama Head in the Clouds and Townsend’s own directorial debut, the politically charged true-life tale Battle in Seattle. Admitting she “never dreamed of the white dress” when she was young, in the past Theron has said that she and Townsend would never officially tie the knot until gay and lesbian couples in America enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals. “I want to be clear about this,” she says. “I am not judgmental about marriage. But I am judgmental about how our government doesn’t want to see the reality of gay and lesbian marriages.”
In her mind, she’s married to Townsend in all but name anyway. During a press conference for The Burning Plain, she had to bat away an advance from a rather-too-amorous journalist. “You’re very cute,” she quipped, demonstrating a sense of fun that is sometimes obscured by her heavyweight CV. “But my boyfriend will kill you. I’m married. I’m taken.” Back home, she says they lead the simple life – gardening, going to the beach and walking their dogs – rather than promoting themselves as a party-hopping celebrity couple. As for kids, she says: “I just know in my bones I want to be a mom one day – but I don’t know when it’s going to happen.”
For the moment, her work is what absorbs her. She’s next up in The Road, a bleak apocalyptic tale based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, in which she co-stars with Viggo Mortensen. All she’s looking for is a fresh challenge every time she steps in front of the camera. “Every work I leave behind definitely changes me and makes me think about myself differently.” Like Kim Basinger, Theron looks set to be around for a long time to come.  James Mottram is Marie Claire’s film critic and writes for The Independent. The Burning Plain is released on DVD on 24 August. The Road will be released later in the year.
