When Charlize Theron appears on screen in her new film, Hancock, it’s as the archetypal soccer mom, a vision of all-American apple-pie goodness, blonde and peachy, wearing a look of tender concern towards her blonde and peachy son. She looks as if she was born for the part, raised on a diet of milk and cookies in the suburbs before setting off for Hollywood. Which just goes to show. She has the looks and the accent, but English isn’t even her first language; she’s actually an Afrikaner from small-town South Africa. She grew up under apartheid. When she was 15 years old, her mother gunned down her alcoholic father on the family smallholding after he turned violent.
So much for soccer mom. But then Theron’s cheesecake looks are always a bit of a red herring. She’s known for her beauty — how could she not be? When she walks into a room she reduces everyone else to hobbits — but she’s better known for her acting. Her looks marked her out for a lifetime of girlfriend roles, like those she played in The Cider House Rules or The Italian Job, but then in 2003 along came Monster and an Oscar for her terrifying portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos.
At times, talking to her, it feels as she’s a double agent in deep cover. As if there’s not one Charlize Theron, but at least two, if not a few more. Even her choice of films seems like the Charlizes are all in conflict with one another. Her recent appearances have been in small indies on politically contentious topics — In the Valley of Elah, about returning soldiers from Iraq, Battle in Seattle, about the anti-globalization riots, and Sleepwalking, about a woman who abandons her child.
And now there’s Hancock, a major studio picture starring perhaps the most major studio star around, Will Smith, as an antisocial superhero. It’s all set to be this summer’s blockbuster — which makes it sound like dross, whereas it’s actually smart and funny, but about a million times more commercial than anything she’s done in recent times.
You keep your audience guessing, I tell her. “I keep myself guessing. I get bored so quickly. I just really liked the material. And the girl was cool. I wasn’t ticking any boxes. I just try and do good material and how it gets made is secondary ... And anyway, it’s really nice to get a decent paycheck.”
It sounds like she’s unlikely to make a habit of it, though. “I do like the challenge of finding material that people don’t want to risk a lot of money on and that studios don’t necessarily jump to go, ‘Yeah! We want to tell that story.’ And how could I not after I had done something like Monster? Everybody wondered how a movie like that could be successful.” Monster is still the touchstone of her career. With the help of prosthetic teeth and Latex skin, she made the character of Aileen Wuornos her own; a woman who was beaten, raped, abused and went on to exact brutal revenge against men as a serial killer.
It could so easily have never happened. Theron would have continued playing the types of roles she had before — a supermodel in Woody Allen’s Celebrity, the love interest in The Legend of Bagger Vance. That she didn’t is down to an unknown director, Patty Jenkins, who sent her the script for Monster.
“I never got offered parts like that, never. And it took a woman, a first-time female director to offer me that role. Paul [Haggis — the director of Crash and In the Valley of Elah] recently said to me, ‘You know, often it’s the material that will define an actor, but you didn’t do that. You defined yourself with what you chose to do.’ And I thought that was a nice compliment.”
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