"Watching Charlize Theron fight has become one of the singular pleasures of contemporary American cinema, as close as we’re going to get to the endorphin rush of watching Gene Kelly dance, or Judy Garland sing, or Charlie Chaplin pantomime."
Charlize Theron (born 7 August 1975 in Benoni, South Africa) is a South African-American actress and producer.
She's from an Afrikaner family that included a military leader during The Second Boer War, Danie Theron, and her ancestry includes Dutch as well as French and German. After working as a model in her teens, she took a one-way trip to Los Angeles in 1998 with the hope of getting into films. She played a non-speaking victim role in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest but got attention as the ruthless girlfriend of James Spader in 2 Days in the Valley; this marked the beginning of her tendency to play characters who get physically punished.
After a string of major roles in not-entirely-unforgettable movies, she played serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, for which she received mass acclaim (with one Roger Ebert calling it "one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema") and numerous Best Actress awards, including a Golden Globe and Academy Award. Since then, she's sought out complex and sometimes unsympathetic roles in quality pictures. She was highly praised for her work in Young Adult as as the jerkass protagonist Mavis Gary, and the fandom went wild when she shaved her head and went Action Girl as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, in which she was the Supporting Protagonist. Since Mad Max she's carved out a solid career in action films, appearing as competent female badasses in Atomic Blonde, The Old Guard, and multiple installments of The Fast and the Furious.
She has been active in supporting many causes, including fighting HIV/AIDS and LGBT+ rights. Theron has also adopted two daughters, and one has come out as transgender, with her unequivocal public support.
Filmography:
Films
- 1995 Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest as Eli's follower (uncredited)
- 1996 2 Days in the Valley as Helga Svelgen
- 1996 That Thing You Do! as Tina Powers
- 1997 The Devil's Advocate as Mary Ann Lomax
- 1998 Celebrity as Supermodel
- 1998 Mighty Joe Young as Jill Young
- 1999 The Astronaut's Wife as Jillian Armacost
- 1999 The Cider House Rules as Candy Kendall
- 2000 Reindeer Games as Ashley Mercer
- 2000 The Legend of Bagger Vance as Adele Invergordon
- 2000 Men of Honor as Gwen Sunday
- 2001 15 Minutes as Rose Hearn
- 2001 The Curse of the Jade Scorpion as Laura Kensington
- 2003 The Italian Job as Stella Bridger
- 2003 Monster as Aileen Wuornos
- 2004 Head in the Clouds as Gilda Bessé
- 2004 The Life and Death of Peter Sellers as Britt Ekland
- 2005 North Country as Josey Aimes
- 2005 Æon Flux as Aeon Flux
- 2007 In the Valley of Elah as Det. Emily Sanders
- 2007 Battle In Seattle as Ella
- 2008 Hancock as Mary Embrey
- 2009 The Road as Wife
- 2009 Astro Boy as Narrator (voice)
- 2011 Young Adult as Mavis Gary
- 2012 Snow White & the Huntsman as Queen Ravenna
- 2012 Prometheus as Meredith Vickers
- 2014 A Million Ways to Die in the West as Anna
- 2015 Dark Places as Libby Day
- 2015 Mad Max: Fury Road as Imperator Furiosa
- 2016 Kubo and the Two Strings as Monkey/Sariatu (voice)
- 2017 Atomic Blonde as Lorraine Broughton
- The Fast and the Furious as Cipher
- 2017 The Fate of the Furious
- 2021 F9 (aka F9: The Fast Saga or Fast and Furious 9)
- 2023 Fast X
- 2018 Tully as Marlo Moreau
- 2018 Gringo as Elaine Markinson
- 2019 The Addams Family as Morticia Addams (voice)
- 2021 The Addams Family 2
- 2019 Long Shot as Secretary of State Charlotte Fields
- 2019 Bombshell as Megyn Kelly
- 2020 The Old Guard as Andromache of Scythia ("Andy")
- 2022 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as Clea
- 2022 The School for Good and Evil as Lady Lesso
Television
- 2005 Arrested Development as Rita Leeds
- 2006 Robot Chicken as Daniel's Mom/Mother/Waitress (voice)
- 2017 The Orville as Pria Lavesque
- 2020 Home Movie: The Princess Bride as Fezzik
- 2022 The Boys as the Stormfront actress in Dawn of the Seven
Theron's works provide examples of:
- Acting in the Dark: She confessed that at some points in Mad Max: Fury Road, she had no idea what she was actually filming.
- Action Girl: She had previously played such roles since the title character in Æon Flux, but her major shift towards them started with Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Others quickly followed, such as Lorraine Broughton from Atomic Blonde and Andy from The Old Guard.
- Actor Allusion: A scene in Atomic Blonde has a bottle of Christian Dior perfume visible. Charlize has done endorsements for Dior since 2004.
- Awesome, Dear Boy: She says that her main motivation is the chance to work with people such as John Frankenheimer, Ridley Scott, Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody, and George Miller.
- Beauty Inversion:
- Her role in Monster, in which she gained weight and shaved her eyebrows, among other things, and which won her an Oscar, is considered a poster child for this being used as Oscar Bait, although it's widely agreed that unlike many cases of this, she actually had the acting ability to back it up. Funnily enough, it was the project that got her the Dior endorsement deal.
- A less extreme example in Snow White & the Huntsman, where she plays a queen who keeps herself young via magic, and her powers begin to fade, meaning she grows older and uglier as the story goes on, even turning into a withered husk as she dies.
- Career Resurrection: A slower build than some, but appearing prominently in Snow White & the Huntsman and Prometheus in the same year helped establish a reputation as one of Hollywood's Action Girls in The New '10s. With Mad Max: Fury Road, she won the critical acclaim that brought it about. Notably, she had been trying to develop Atomic Blonde for years, and Mad Max's success helped guide it.
- Celebrity Endorsement: Famously appeared in Dior's "J'adore" perfume commercials.
- Chronically Killed Actor: She has died in a wide variety of ways throughout her career: impaled by a giant plant demon; shot in the gut; committed suicide after being raped by Satan; died of cancer; executed by lethal injection; fallen from a great height; crushed to death by a spaceship falling on her, etc. She's even died twice in the same franchise.
- Creator-Chosen Casting: She was the only choice for the role of Mavis in Young Adult, and although Patty Jenkins had been considering other actresses for Monster, she offered the role to Charlize after seeing The Devil's Advocate.
- Dark and Troubled Past: She has played quite a few characters who have this, Aileen Wuornos and Imperator Furiosa being the most glaring examples.
- Dyeing for Your Art:
- She put on over 20 pounds of weight, shaved off her eyebrows and wore prosthetic teeth while filming Monster.
- She also dyed her hair black to play the title character in Æon Flux.
- She also shaved her head to play Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, and did it again for re-shoots after it grew back. As a result, she had to wear a wig for A Million Ways to Die in the West.
- More recently, she put on nearly 50 pounds for her role in Tully.
- Fake American: She has yet to play someone who's actually South African (although her character in Mighty Joe Young lives in Africa, she's American).note
- Fake Brit: She puts on a passable English accent for her role as Queen Ravenna.
- Fan Disservice:
- She goes full frontal in The Devil's Advocate, but with her body absolutely covered in bloody cuts from having been raped by Satan himself, it's anything but titillating.
- In the very beginning of Atomic Blonde she takes a bath...in iced water, with bruises, cuts and scrapes all over her body. It becomes clear later in the movie that this scene takes place chronologically towards the end of the story, after her character has battled through an epic stairway fight against multiple attackers.
- Fashionista: While not generally known as a model, she's the face of Christian Dior perfumes since the mid-2000s, "J'adore" especially.
- Funny Character, Boring Actor: Inverted. Known for playing various dark characters, and she's found herself playing a lot of humorless Ice Queens in The New '10s. In interviews she's very goofy, and claims that when she met Barack Obama, she accidentally invited him to a strip club. She also happily describes herself as a Gasshole on set.
- Hidden Depths: One of her lesser-known talents is that she can perfectly imitate a goat, due to growing up on a farm.
- Large Ham: In both Monster and Snow White & the Huntsman.
- Method Acting: Has said in interviews that she started out trying to do this, but found it too hard to keep up, especially in a film like The Devil's Advocate where her character got so completely put through the wringer (and, it's implied, in the service of a fairly tacky story). By the time she made Monster, she'd learned to lighten the atmosphere on set by making jokes (in fact, she later said that she would rather feel the character's emotions as she reads/performs them instead of this, and it's said to be the biggest reason why there was tension between her and frequently-method Tom Hardy during the making of Fury Road).
- Money, Dear Boy: The Sony email hacks revealed that Chris Hemsworth was being paid $10 million to do The Huntsman: Winter's War. Charlize refused to reprise her role unless she was paid the same amount. As she was a proven box office draw, she was granted this.
- Ms. Fanservice: In some of her roles, such as The Cider House Rules, Æon Flux, and Head in the Clouds.
- No Stunt Double:
- Despite injuring her neck while filming Æon Flux, she still continued to do her own stunts for the rest of the production.
- Ditto with Atomic Blonde. She did her own stunts and kept going while having horrible pains after breaking two teeth while filming a fight scene.note
- Old Shame:
- She openly loathes her uncredited debut in Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest.
- While she doesn't regret getting the chance to work with John Frankenheimer, like everybody else involved in Reindeer Games she doesn't think much of the final film.
- Pretty in Mink:
- In Men of Honor, she was a socialite in a blue dress and brown mink stole. She invites Carl, who is aspiring to the first black American naval diver, to an all-white club, just for a lark. Sunday even notes her attire to ascertain her motives.
- In a 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, which discussed Charlize as an up-and-coming actor, she did a Fanservice Cover where she wore nothing but a full-length white fox coat.
- Playing Against Type: Her comedic role in Arrested Development as childish Cloudcuckoolander Rita Leeds who turns out to be mentally retarded, a marked stark contrast to her action or dramatic fare.
- Rape as Drama: This happens to many of her characters. Joked in a press conference that she sometimes thinks that producers say of a character "Does she get raped and cry? Send it to Charlize."
- Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: She wears a wig in A Million Ways to Die in the West, as she had shaved her head for Mad Max: Fury Road.
- Retroactive Recognition: She is the girl in this
popular 1998 Martini commercial. - She Really Can Act: After being considered a bit of an "It" Girl for being perfectly fine in a string of generally forgettable films, she got this for Monster. Roger Ebert called her work one of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema, and admitted that having walked into the film after the opening credits, he didn't even realise it was her until he saw her name in the closing credits.
- Statuesque Stunner: At 5'10" she tends to tower over her castmates. Not that anyone's complaining.
- Stunt Casting: She has a cameo As Herself in The Boys (2019) playing Stormfront in the film within a film Dawn of the Seven, since the real Stormfront's public image has been destroyed at this point, and the character is presented as the film's Big Bad.
- Throw It In!: In Monster, she ad-libbed the memorable line "fuck you, Leslie".
- Underage Casting: She was only 21 in The Devil's Advocate playing the girlfriend of the 30-year-old Keanu Reeves, and strongly implied to be the same age.
- What Could Have Been:
- She was offered a part in Showgirls but turned it down, not wanting to appear nude. She changed her mind by the time The Devil's Advocate came along.
- She was meant to play Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus but a scheduling conflict led her to drop out. When her schedule freed up, Noomi Rapace had been cast as Elizabeth - so Charlize played Meredith Vickers instead.
- She dropped out of J. Edgar to star in Snow White & the Huntsman.
- She was approached to star in Wonder Woman, which would have reunited her with director Patty Jenkins after Monster. She turned the offer down, calling the fact of being asked to play Wonder Woman's mom (Queen Hippolyta) while she's just nine years older than Gal Gadot "a slap in the face. She ended up having a role in the rival superhero film franchise instead.
