How Charlize Theron became one of Hollywood’s most astonishing action stars
As the Oscar-winning actor’s latest action movie arrives on Netflix, Geoffrey Macnab speaks to her acting coach to delve into how she became the ‘astonishing’ star she is today
In a summer bereft of superhero movies, Charlize Theron’s latest feature The Old Guard, which she produced as well as starred in, is expected to reach at least 72 million households in the next four weeks. That’s one of the highest ever numbers for a film on Netflix. The success underlines Theron’s status as one of Hollywood’s most bankable female action stars, both at the box office and, while most cinemas remain closed, on video on demand too.
Theron plays Andromache (“call me Andy”), a warrior who leads “a group of immortals”. For centuries, they’ve been living in the shadows, fighting for what is right.
“She is able to do something I’ve never quite managed to do and that is to tell narrative through physicality,” Theron’s co-star Chiwetel Ejiofor recently told GQ. He spoke admiringly of the “exquisite poetry” in seeing Theron wield a four-foot axe. “To put all the nuance of a character into a very complex fight sequence using only choreography is quite astonishing.”
As such remarks attest, Theron has dramatically shifted expectations about the action movie, which was once an almost entirely male-dominated genre. In the 1980s, female warriors like Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja (1985) or Grace Jones as Zula in Conan the Destroyer (1984), were figures of high camp. Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (1984) and Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979) began to cut through the sexist stereotyping, a process that Theron is now continuing. Whether in The Old Guard or as the one-armed skinhead Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) or as the spy Lorraine in Atomic Blonde (2017), you expect her to be tougher, more resourceful and relentless than any of her male counterparts.
Not that she simply imitates the moves made by male action stars. Mad Max director George Miller (who called her “scarily good”) recalled that, during the shooting of that film, Theron was determined “not to do any action as if it were a female doing a man’s job”.
As a teenager, Theron had aspired to become a professional dancer. Injury ruined her dream but she still shows balletic grace in her fight sequences. “I think there is still a part of me that is very much a dancer. I am fascinated by storytelling through the physical,” she told IGN in a 2017 interview. “There is something very powerful in movement … and in how you hold your body that says so much more than verbalising.”
As Old Guard director Gina Prince-Bythewood points out, Theron is convincing with her fists, too. “If you can throw a punch, we are going to believe that you are a fighter.” Rumours emerged last week that she might now accept an invitation to fight in a WWE match – and that is something Meryl Streep has never done.
When a film’s insurers allow it, Theron will do her own stunts. Her fights are generally shot with minimal cutting to heighten the sense that they’re happening in real time and aren’t dependent on special effects.
There is a Cinderella aspect to Theron’s discovery which appeals to fans. Born in August 1975, she grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era. When she was 15, her mother shot and killed her alcoholic father in self-defence. After her ballet career faltered, she was “discovered” in Los Angeles when having an altercation with a bank teller who was refusing to cash a cheque for her. John Crosby, an acting agent, was waiting behind her. Impressed by her rage, he handed her his card. Theron was given acting classes and told to lose her South African accent.
The story instantly became part of Hollywood myth. Like Lana Turner, the teenage star supposedly talent-spotted when having lunch in Schwab’s Drugstore, Theron was the outsider plucked from obscurity and put in front of the cameras.
However, as her acting coach Ivana Chubbuck tells me, there was nothing lucky or accidental about Theron’s success. “She was a hard worker, one of the hardest workers I have ever seen. She just jumped right in, took chances and wasn’t afraid of really looking at her flaws, her fears and her insecurities,” Chubbuck remembers. “She was 19 at the time. Most people who are in their teens or early twenties have no work ethic whatsoever and they don’t figure out they need to have a work ethic until they get older, but she had that work ethic…she always wanted double work. She always wanted to rehearse. She was somebody who was very curious about everything.”
When Theron landed a role in a film that was shooting nearby, she would still come to Chubbuck’s acting classes during her lunch break, sit at the back and eat her sandwiches. “She worked her ass off in class. She was a diligent, diligent worker.”
Theron is fearless in her choices. Chubbuck likens her to a chameleon and talks of her uncanny ability to “personalise extreme characters”. She is the Oscar winner who you’ll see on screen in a dark psycho-drama one moment and then in one of the Fast & Furious movies the next. She will play a supermodel in one film and then a mass murderer in another. Her resistance to typecasting has been obvious from the start of her Hollywood career in the late 1990s.
It’s intriguing to watch Theron in Tarantino-style thriller 2 Days in The Valley (1996), her first proper film (although she had had a non-speaking part in Children of the Corn III the year before). Theron plays Helga, the “sexpot girlfriend” (as The New York Times styled her) of a sadistic contract killer (James Spader).“I just want to look at you,” Spader leers at Helga during one of the sex scenes, devouring her greedily with his eyes. Theron is presented as the quintessential badass femme fatale, the fantasy figure ogled over by the male characters. The film has her first screen brawl, a prolonged, tongue-in-cheek, but still very violent fight with Teri Hatcher, which ends with Theron being clonked on the head with a heavy glass vase. It’s not as slickly choreographed as her battles in Atomic Blonde and The Old Guard but it shows that even then, at the very start of her career, Theron was ready to roll with the punches. She brought humour and personality to a role that could have seemed one-dimensional.
In those early years, directors weren’t always imaginative in how they used Theron. In Woody Allen’s Celebrity, she is again the object of the male protagonist’s longing and lust. She is playing a supermodel. There is a toe-curling scene early on in which the bumbling journalist hero (Kenneth Branagh) takes her for a drive in his Aston Martin and they then go for a drink.
”You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. Every curve in your body fulfils its promise. If the universe has any meaning at all, I am looking at it,” he tells her. When he asks if she has a flaw, she replies that, yes, actually, she does: her affliction is that she is “polymorphously perverse” and every part of her body gives her “erotic pleasure”.
If Theron had carried on appearing in films like 2 Days in the Valley and Celebrity, her career might soon have hit a dead-end. Directors seemed to regard her as an equivalent to Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita or as a Nineties equivalent to Jayne Mansfield. On one magazine cover, she was called “a white hot Venus”. Reviewers would continually refer to her as “gorgeous” or “preposterously beautiful” or as “a blonde, tall bombshell”. They were often dismissive about her acting. When she appeared opposite a 15-foot ape in Mighty Joe Young (1998), The New York Times suggested she and her co-star Bill Paxton seemed “almost animatronic themselves”. She was racking up credits in biggish budget mainstream films like thriller Reindeer Games and the remake of The Italian Job but seldom taking roles which challenged her.
Acting coach Chubbuck bristles at the idea that Theron’s early success was based on her looks. “Pretty is a dime a dozen in Hollywood,” Chubbuck complains. “Anybody who says she got in the door because of her looks is wrong. I know her history.” She cites The Devil’s Advocate (1997), in which Theron starred alongside Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino, as an early example of Theron pushing herself to extremes. She plays a young woman tussling with the devil. “It had nothing to do with being pretty. In fact, one of the reasons she almost didn’t get that role is they said she was too pretty.” After the first audition, the casting directors felt that Theron was too young and too good-looking for the role but she had made such an impression that they called her in again. “They couldn’t get the audition out of their heads because she was so good. They cast her anyway. It was all about the acting.”
Everything changed with Theron’s Oscar-winning performance as the killer Aileen Wuornos in future Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins’ low budget Monster (2003). Aileen is the small-town girl who dreams of being rich and beautiful like Marilyn Monroe, but ends up as a sex worker living on the streets. Eventually, after enduring a lifetime of hardship and abuse, she becomes a killer. She is pasty-faced and very abrasive.
To portray Wuornos, Theron put on 30 pounds and wore prosthetic teeth. She relished the chance to escape the shallow glamour of most of her earlier films. “It was very odd to me that a filmmaker came to me with this kind of material,” Theron confessed at being offered such a gritty, downbeat role as a real-life character who had ended up on death row. Of Wuornos, she said, “I think her life was like water going down a drain.”
Jenkins had approached Theron after seeing her in The Devil’s Advocate on TV. The director realised that even in formulaic Hollywood movies, Theron always showed complete commitment. It could have seemed like stunt casting – beauty playing the “beast” – but Theron’s performance was so heartfelt and intense that nobody questioned why she had been chosen.
Winning an Oscar for Monster allowed Theron to re-invent herself. She already had her own production company, Denver and Delilah, which had co-produced the film. No longer would she be cast as objects of slavering male fantasy for directors like Woody Allen.
Theron has continued to appear in big-budget studio movies, but now does so on her own terms. Her range is startling. She has played wicked queens (Snow White and the Huntsman), hardbitten detectives (In the Valley of Elah), abused wives (North Country) and her share of repressed and traumatised women in films like The Burning Plain and Dark Places. She can go from playing a lethal assassin and spy in Atomic Blonde to starring as a harassed, hugely pregnant mother who feels “like an abandoned trash barge” in Tully a few months later. She has done screwball romantic comedy (Long Shot) and dark sci-fi drama (Prometheus). She was Oscar-nominated for her role as broadcaster Megyn Kelly, dealing both with insults from Donald Trump and harassment from her boss Roger Ailes, in last year’s Bombshell.
One of Theron’s finest performances came in Jason Reitman’s Young Adult (2011), in which she plays Mavis Gary, a woman in her late thirties who can’t accept the way her life has turned out. Mavis was always the most popular girl at high school. Now, she is a divorced, mentally unstable alcoholic whose career as a ghost writer of young-adult novels is faltering. She returns to her hometown on a crackpot mission to win back her teenage sweetheart, blithely ignoring the fact he is already married and has a baby daughter. Theron makes a needy, narcissistic and deeply irritating character (“a psychotic prom-queen bitch” as her old school colleagues call her) seem both comic and sympathetic. Mavis always says the wrong thing. She is tactless and selfish – and yet we warm to her all the same. Theron delivers screenwriter Diablo Cody’s acerbic lines with relish.
There aren’t many other actors currently working who can go from playing dishevelled and dysfunctional types in dialogue-driven, indie comedy dramas like Young Adult and Tully to being the alpha females in big budget action movies. Now Theron has one of the hit films of the year in The Old Guard. This may be a superhero film based on a comic book, but Theron plays her role with a familiar soulful intensity. Being an immortal has made Andromache world-weary. She is half yearning for the time when her wounds won’t heal and she will be allowed to die. Put a four-foot axe in her hands, though, and she is lethal. It’s not just her capacity for violence that startles us but the elegance and control she shows in the heat of battle. Compared to her, old school action stars like Schwarzenegger and Stallone seem like blundering buffoons.
The Old Guard is on Netflix now
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments