CHARLIZE THERON:
A DETERMINED BEAUTY
BY SKIP HOLLANDSWORTH PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES WHITE
Here she comes, walking into the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, dressed simply in a green zip-up jacket, a plain orange T-shirt, jeans, and flats. There’s not a trace of makeup on her face, and her hair is unbrushed, held back by a pair of Christian Dior sunglasses. As she lowers herself onto a couch and curls one long leg underneath her 5-foot 9-inch body, she sees me giving her the once-over and says, her lips curling upward into a smile, “What? Were you expecting me to wear one of my Oscar dresses?”
“I have to admit, I wouldn’t have complained,” I reply.
Charlize Theron throws back her head and lets out a laugh that makes just about everyone in the lobby do a double take. “One time, I had a director who wanted me to shoot a scene where I woke up in a bed one morning wearing full makeup,” she says. “He threw a fit when I wouldn’t do it. I just looked at him and said, ‘Please, no woman in history has ever looked like that first thing in the morning. I’m going to act like a real woman, and that’s all there is to it.’”
At the age of 33, Theron remains one of the world’s most striking beauties, her skin utterly flawless, her eyes blue, and her blond hair practically luminescent. “She’s one of those rare actresses who is actually just as gorgeous in person as she is on the screen,” says Taylor Hackford, the acclaimed director of such films as
Ray who gave Theron one of her first starring roles when he cast her in 1997’s
Devil’s Advocate.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone who is better at playing the blond bombshell. Just rent a copy of
Hancock, last summer’s blockbuster Will Smith vehicle, in which she was cast as a suburban housewife with a secret -- a role
The New Yorker’s movie critic described as “the sexiest performance of her career.” Or take another look at the television commercial she does for Dior (which has been running consistently since 2006 -- an eternity in advertising), in which she strides confidently down a hallway while giving the camera a knee-buckling come-hither look.
Yet since she first came to Hollywood nearly 15 years ago, Theron has adamantly worked to land roles that, as she puts it, “don’t play pretty.” She regularly turns down huge paydays in big-budget movies to portray instead troubled women who are often social outcasts -- or worse. In 2003, she played the angry, bleary-eyed, overweight serial killer Aileen Wuornos in
Monster, which won her a Best Actress Oscar. In 2005’s
North Country (which garnered her another Oscar nomination), she played a beleaguered, working-class single mother fighting her employers over sexual harassment, and in 2007’s
In The Valley of Elah, she played a stressed single mother forced to endure the chauvinistic behavior of her colleagues at a small-town police department. And last year, she happily took on roles in smaller independent films that weren’t even released nationwide, appearing as another desperate single mom in
Sleepwalking and as the pregnant wife of an out-of-control cop in
Battle in Seattle, a movie about the controversial 1999 World Trade Organization talks, written and directed by her longtime boyfriend, Stuart Townsend.
This September,
The Burning Plain, another independent film starring Theron, is slated to be released. In the film, which she also produced, she plays a haunted Oregon restaurant manager who tries to come to terms with a turbulent past. The movie has already been released in the U.K., and a reviewer for the British newspaper
The Daily Telegraph wrote that Theron and her costar Kim Basinger “both look like racing certs for next year’s awards season.”
“This is a story that’s a complex, character-driven film, not an event film,” Theron says. “And my character is flawed, very flawed.” She shrugs. “If you’re looking for another romantic comedy so you can laugh and think all is right with the world, then this is not for you.” Theron adds, leaning back on the couch as she sips hot tea, “If most of my career consists of playing characters who are complicated and flawed -- which means characters that real people recognize and identify with -- then I feel like I’m accomplishing something. Come on, how boring would it be if all I did was wait around for another movie about another glamorous woman?”
A few days before my interview, I had a conversation with a high-powered Hollywood agent who warned me that I would not be prepared for Theron. “She’s a movie star who’s completely honest, completely devoid of all the usual Hollywood b.s.,” the agent had said. “You’ll wonder why more movie stars aren’t like her. But then again, they haven’t come close to living the kind of life she’s had to live.”
Born in South Africa in 1975, Theron grew up on a farm, the daughter of road-construction business owners. Her father could be charming, but he was also a raging, abusive alcoholic. After winning a South African modeling contest, Theron moved to Milan to work for a modeling agency, at her mother’s encouragement and for a chance at a better life. “I was way too young to do such a thing, but it was my mom’s way of giving me a fresh start,” she says.
Her agents told her that all she needed to do to become a supermodel was lose 10 pounds, but to their astonishment, Theron soon quit the business altogether, telling them that she wasn’t going to waste her time trying to get too skinny. After living for a couple of years in New York, where she danced with a professional ballet troupe, she moved to Los Angeles to try her hand at acting. She was an immediate sensation, despite the fact that she never had taken any acting lessons. Producers and directors fell all over themselves for her, telling her she could be the next great A-list bombshell.
But after taking on a few glamour-girl roles and after playing the pretty girlfriend in such movies as
The Legend of Bagger Vance, Theron says she began showing up at auditions “wearing bad T-shirts and baggy pants and with my hair all dirty, just in the hope that directors would realize I could do more than be the arm candy to some handsome actor.” Eventually, she dismantled everything Hollywood people thought they knew about her. She gained 30 pounds; shaved her eyebrows; and added prosthetics, tattoos, and yellowed false teeth in order to play Wuornos in
Monster. Her film agents -- and just about everyone else who knew her -- told her she would ruin her career by taking on such a sordid role in a small-budget independent film. They said audiences would never forgive her. They were wrong.
Theron’s life seems to be at a point of complete fulfillment, and includes a boyfriend she has been with for the last eight years. She met Townsend, an Irishman, on a movie set, and the two act so blissfully happy that tabloid editors are too bored to waste space on them.
“Actually,” she says, “the real reason the paparazzi never see us is because we never go to trendy places. We like to sit home with our friends, drink some wine, and play a game called Mexican Train. It’s a form of dominoes. Or we sit around and read. Or occasionally, we sit around and watch bad television.”
When I try to keep the interview going by asking about her daily schedule, she rolls her eyes good-naturedly and says, “Oh, no, is this where I have to tell you how often I work out and what I eat and what time I fall asleep?”
“Well, just by the looks of you, I assume you have a serious work-out regimen,” I say.
“Okay, not long ago, I did sign myself and my whole staff at my production office up at a nearby gym, and we made a pact that we would start going there. We lasted two months. I’m just not a big gym person. I don’t like to use machines. I do yoga and outdoorsy things, and that’s about it. What I do like to do is live a healthy lifestyle, and that goes a long way in staying fit.”
Theron is much more concerned with her work than her figure. She says that she is certainly not averse to accepting future roles for big-budget, crowd-pleasing movies. She is, in fact, working on a remake of a famous Korean film,
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, in which she would play a woman who, after being released from prison for a crime she didn’t commit, sets out on a crusade of revenge. She’s also negotiating to star with Tom Cruise in
The Tourist, a thriller in which Theron would play a detective from the European Interpol office who manipulates an innocent tourist from America to help her find a criminal who just happens to be her former lover.
Theron takes one last sip of tea and then stands up to go. Tonight, she says, she will spend her evening piled up in her bed, reading new scripts that her agents have sent her. “Maybe there’s another gem in there. That’s always my hope.”
“And if the gem turns out to be one of those movies that few people see?” I ask.
“I’ll still take it in a heartbeat,” she says. “After all these years, the one thing I’ve learned is that you never let a good thing pass you by.”