INTERVIEW:Between adopting a child and campaigning for various rights, Charlize Theron made two films. TARA BRADYtries to pin down the sometimes demure star who gets flirty with Fassbender
IT’S BEEN HARD to avoid Charlize Theron these past few weeks. Last month, a veritable “who’s who” of film media converged on London’s Leicester Square for a first look at Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. The Alien prequel is the veteran director’s first science fiction film since Blade Runner, and the grand occasion was marked by a question-and-answer session featuring Scott and primary cast Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender.
The same occasion was also notable for the South African Oscar winner’s onstage flirting with the Killarney-raised actor. Ignoring most enquiries from the assembled crowd, Theron giggled like a schoolgirl and batted her eyelashes in the direction of the Irishman.
A similarly giddy Theron turns up at the London press conference for Snow White and the Huntsman. She’s a different Theron to the demure, quiet woman I met earlier this morning. Theron may be hard to miss, but that doesn’t mean she’s easy to pin down.
Sitting pretty in a suite at the Dorchester Hotel, in a white silk shirt offset by a slick of red lipstick, you’d be hard pressed to single her out as the jealous, older wicked queen, stepmum to Kristen’s Stewart’s Snow White. You’d also be hard-pressed to single her out as the star who famously does un-Hollywood things. Like boozing. And swearing. And thumping.
She speaks softly and seriously about her ascendancy to the fairytale throne. “She’s such an iconic character,” says Theron. “And the story’s so iconic. I can’t even remember when I first encountered it. I think she’s somebody we think of as evil.”
Ever since she won an Academy Award for her depiction of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster, Theron has plumped for mostly low-key issue-driven films such as North Country and In the Valley of Elah. Between gigs, she’s noted for her activism on behalf of Peta, her appearances at pro-choice rallies and fundraising to improve African infrastructure.
She has also ensured a degree of creative control by producing her own star vehicles. Unlike Sleepwalking, The Burning Plain and Young Adult, Snow White and the Huntsman did not originate with Theron’s Denver and Delilah Productions (named for her two dogs) imprint. But she did have a say in the finished product.
“I spent a lot of time with the writers,” she says. “I was working with them up until the day we started shooting. Making that character real was the main reason Rupert Saunders, the director, and Joe Roth, the producer, wanted to make this movie. By the time I read the original script, that process had begun. I just pushed it a little further.”
The film, a swashbuckling epic in the style of Lord of the Rings, could not be further from Julia Roberts’ all-winking, all-nudging rival Snow White vehicle, Mirror Mirror.
But, as Theron will readily admit, kitsch isn’t exactly her style. “I only know how to work from a foundation of reality,” she says. “If I had that skill set I would use it. But I can only work or play as an actor when I understand what I’m doing. I need an anchor.”
Born in Benoni in South Africa, Charlize, a descendant of Boer War hero Daniel Theron, did not have an easy upbringing. In 1991, her mother shot and killed her abusive alcoholic father following an incident in which he attacked both women.
The teenager won a one-year modelling contract in Milan the following year and relocated there with her mother, Gerda. From Europe, Theron moved to the US and New York’s Joffrey School, where she hoped to train as a ballerina. It was not to be; within two terms, her knees gave out, leaving the young Theron in a major slump.
Gerda, hoping to ease Charlize’s depression, bought her daughter a ticket to Los Angeles. Within months she had landed her first movie roles in Children of the Corn III and 2 Days in the Valley. By 1998, on the back of work in The Devil’s Advocate and Mighty Joe Young, she was a bona fide movie player and Vanity Fair cover star.
Theron seemed like just another pretty face – until, that is, she piled on the pounds and mouseyed down her hair for Monster. Since then she had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to go all the way for the job – she suffered a herniated disc in her neck shooting 2005’s Æon Flux and injured her vocal cords shooting the labour scenes for 2009’s The Road.
Perhaps more impressively, Theron has never shied away from looking like a cat lady and acting like a right cow onscreen. In Snow White and the Huntsman she ages up and down; in last year’s Young Adult, she played a drunken, delusional loser out to destroy an old boyfriend’s marriage.
“I don’t know how to play a character and make it about myself,” she says. “Creatively, there’s nothing as satisfying as exploring the human condition to the absolute max. You can’t have vanity about it. To me it’s not interesting to only play pretty, flawless characters. That would be so boring.”
In common with Snow White’s Queen Ravenna, Theron’s corporate lady-suit in Prometheus is far from being an easy sell. Once again, the actor had a little talk with the screenwriters before she decided to commit. “She’s not the new Ripley,” says the 35-year-old. “That’s more Noomi’s role. But she’s not the one-dimensional character you think she is at first either. She might have been in the first draft. But there’s a lot more to her.”
Theron and the Irish actor Stuart Townsend separated in 2010, after nine years together, but she now has a new man in her life. In March of this year, she announced the adoption of Jackson, her infant son. She has, she says, since she was eight years old, known she would adopt. But she couldn’t have predicted the aftermath.
“I’m about to start shooting the new Mad Max movie,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d ever want to go back to work . . . [but] having him has made me feel really, really creative. This little innocent baby is making me more curious about the human condition than ever before.”
Snow White and the Huntsman opens on May 30th; Prometheus opens on June 1st
