Interview: Charlize Theron
Woody Allen said it: ‘She’s so hot that if she was in this room, your buttons would melt.’ Body of a dancer, crystal complexion, hypnotic green eyes, a shock of blonde, all offset by low-key style (jeans, T-shirt, heels)… and her cocker spaniel, Denver. ‘That guy there,’ she says pointing to the dog, ‘that guy makes all the decisions. Look at him. He’s working very hard. He’s thinking about what’s next for me.’
The dog is the giveaway. Charlize is quirky. More than that – she’s not obvious A-list.
You can go as far as to say Theron is the Johnny Depp of the Hollywood beauty palette. She consistently refuses to capitalise on her looks. An Oscar winner (Monster) and Oscar nominee (North Country), she subverts her beauty in nearly every movie she makes. Her most recent roll was in anti-superhero movie Hancock. She played a teacher, married to Jason Bateman, with the perfect suburban life until tortured superhero Will Smith drops in and blows their life apart.
She chose the role for its subversion of an archetypal American tradition. ‘It’s always brave to take a quintessential genre and turn that on its head,’ she says. ‘What if superheroes were alcoholics, tired of saving people, actually lonely, wanting love. I thought that was interesting.’
Why she doesn’t want a traditional career is obvious when you meet here. She’s off-the-wall, she’s funny, she’s strong and if you haven’t heard her story, it helps to explain why.
Brought up in South Africa, on a farm, her parents ran a construction company. Living in a state of unrest they were political, ‘in our house the news was always on, the newspaper was always on the dining room table and my parents had a real thirst for politics’. When she was 15, her estranged father Charles, broke into the house drunk, with a gun, fired it and was shot dead by her mother, Gerda, in self-defence. This isn’t something she talks about, other than to say: ‘I don’t think you can go through something like that and not kind of walk with it, hand in hand.’
Her burgeoning career was only quintessentially pin-up for the first film, Two Days in the Valley. By The Devil’s Advocate, she snaffled the role because, she says, ‘I stopped wearing make-up and brushing my hair, cut down on my sleep and turned up with dark circles under my eyes. Eventually, I convinced them I was physically right.’ She has since gone mainly for meat and anti-glamour. Treading the terrain of the character actress. And every time she’s opted for this route, she’s garnered accolades.
Mention this and Charlize gets antsy with the argument. She’s into real: ‘you can’t fit into a lot of worlds wearing John Galliano or Dior dresses.’ And being herself, saying of her ‘dowdy’ in Valley of Elah ‘that’s my natural hair colour. That’s me with very little make-up. That’s what I look like, so if you don’t consider my character beautiful, I’m sorry, but that’s really me.’
Read the full interview in our July 2008 issue.
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