With a starring role in Seth MacFarlane’s raucous new comedy and a blossoming romance with Sean Penn, Charlize Theron is going all-in on everything.
The sun is dipping beneath the watery horizon, and Charlize Theron and I are sitting on the veranda at Pierre’s, a white-tablecloth joint filled with people wearing shorts. We are in the Florida Keys, staying just a quick walk away at an elegant resort in Islamorada that was once a coconut plantation. When our waiter, Mario, comes by to take our order and we both want exactly the same thing—a screwdriver and a strip steak—the absurdity tees up Theron for the perfect drive straight down the middle of the fairway. “Jesus—we’re like an old married couple,” she says to me. And then to Mario: “We’re here for the early-bird special. We’re coming for our vodka and orange juice and our steaks. He likes his medium, I take mine rare. And we’re gonna go home and watch a crime show and fall asleep. This is how you make a 40-year marriage last—right here.” Mario doesn’t blink. “It’s Tuesday,” he says, brightly. “NCIS is on tonight.”
I have written about Theron twice before and discovered that she is not just more fun than the average movie star; in fact, she takes the cake. Wondering where she is going to run with the conversation next is a little like walking through a field of land mines: Watch your step. If nothing else, it keeps you on your toes.
But it’s not all bluster and subterfuge. The salty, ball-busting humor seems to flow from rather serious stuff, things she’s been puzzling over—in this instance, marriage, family, and aging. Theron reminds me that we once had a long conversation about gay marriage, and when I tell her that my partner and I have still not tied the knot, her eyes light up. “What is your current thinking on that?” she says.
Just laziness, I say.
“Laziness!” she shouts and lets out a full-throated, head-thrown-back cackle. “That’s great!” Theron famously never married actor Stuart Townsend during their nine-year relationship and, partly because of that, is often asked about her very strong opinions about the institution. “See?” she says, a little worked up. “That goes to my point about marriage.”
Which is what? I ask.
“You’re already married!” she says. “I mean, I really do understand the importance and what that ceremony represents to so many people, but it’s just such a personal thing. Let’s put it this way: I never had the dream of the white dress. And watching other people getting married? I think it’s beautiful for them, but to be quite honest, usually I’m sitting there just devastated.” She starts to laugh. “It’s supposed to be this night of celebrating love, and all you see is a couple separated all night making sure everybody else is OK. It just looks like a lot of work. And as you get older, you start sifting through the stuff that really matters.”
Before I can ask where this aversion comes from, she beats me to the punch. “A lot of people want to make it about my past, my mom and dad not being in a great marriage, but I will tell you honestly: I have had a good amount of healthy therapy about it, and it really isn’t about that. Because I think that would kind of showcase itself more in a fear of long-term relationships, which I don’t have at all. I want the long-term relationship. And I don’t really know how to invest in the other thing.”
Theron, 38, has managed to become a kind of stealth iconoclast, a modern-day Kate Hepburn, by refusing to conform to society’s—or Hollywood’s—expectations of her: She’s the tall, gorgeous blonde who almost never makes movies that trade on those attributes; the exceedingly charming and funny woman who never plays the girlfriend, never makes romantic comedies. She adopted her son, Jackson, in 2012 amid a four-year stretch of being single, and now, of course, is dating Sean Penn—another iconoclast who clearly lives by his own set of rules, hard as they may be to decipher. It makes a certain kind of sense: Both have a tendency toward harrowing, physically transformative film roles; both choose their projects based on directors; and both take their social activism very seriously. Penn may go to extreme lengths, from meeting with the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to his tireless relief work in Haiti, but Theron is no slouch, either: She founded the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project in 2007 and was appointed a Messenger of Peace by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. And as someone who knows Penn told me, Theron is more than a little reminiscent of Robin Wright—the one lasting relationship of his life. (Also: Madonna, Wright, Theron—all smart, tough blondes. He clearly has a type.)
When I ask about Penn, Theron pushes back. “I don’t know how you have a healthy relationship with the whole world knowing about it.” When I press a little harder, she says, “Look, we’re dating, and I don’t think we were trying to hide anything. We were photographed; the relationship was kind of written about. I recently did a daylong press junket, which I hadn’t done in forever, and it’s a harsh reminder that whatever people try to hide a press junket behind, it’s really a roundabout way of getting at as much private shit as they can. It was all about what I like to eat and avoiding questions about Sean or my son.”
Finally, though, she offers this: “What I will say is, I was single for a really long time. I was enjoying mommyhood. You just naturally become kind of selfish about your time, and all of it is dedicated to this little thing, whether he needs it or not. And then they get into more of a schedule and you start to think, Wow, wait a second. There’s this passionate creature in me. And going about dating in your late 30s is such a different ball game. I know so well what I want to fit in my life. And the simple answer to that is: Unless he can make my life better? My life is really pretty fucking good.”
One of the reasons her life is so good is that Theron has managed to steer clear of the many pitfalls of Hollywood stardom. She leads a relatively low-key existence in Los Angeles—but while dating Penn has invited some unwelcome drama, it has also created a conflict for Theron: An unguarded person who is constitutionally forthright now has to try and hold her tongue. “What I guess I am trying to say is: A friend kind of stepped into that role, and I really didn’t see it coming. Sean and I have known each other for eighteen years. We were just really good friends. And it’s been slow going because you are aware that you could screw that up and lose it. We had to think about it. But at the end of the day, it was somewhat effortless. It just kind of naturally happened, and before I knew it, I was in something that was making my life better—the people who really love me can see the effect it has had on me.” She starts to laugh. “The last time I was dating, I was 24. I was like, ‘Awww, you’re miserable and moody, but I’m just going to forgive that because you’re so cute! Oh, you treat me so badly, but maybe that will change in five years when I have your children!’ ” She drains her cocktail and orders another. “That just doesn’t exist anymore.”
As the sun turns to a brilliant orange sliver, Theron stops for a moment to take it in. “Look how beautiful that is,” she says. As we sit at our table at the railing on the second floor, perched above the water, the scene unfolds below: torches aflame, couples standing at the water’s edge, drinks in hand, and a gaggle of children running on the beach, and suddenly she’s digging through her bag for her cell. Theron is staying in the biggest house at the resort with Jackson; her publicist, Amanda; her assistant, Elizabeth; and her friend the costume designer Cindy Evans. “I just wanted to tell you guys that if you want to come for a nightcap—and by that I mean a sundowner after your dinner, because could we all be eating any earlier, like old people?—there’s a lot of kids playing on the beach,” she says into the phone. “You guys can sit and have a margarita, and he can just run around with this pack of boys.”
When she hangs up, I ask what she has learned about Jackson’s personality thus far. “He likes big boys. He’s super independent. His awareness just blows my mind. He picks up on things really quickly. Shy at first, and then you can’t stop him. But it’s the shyness that I love because it’s kind of a pensive quality—he susses out the situation, and then he’ll step in and join the group.”
Theron has always known that she wanted to adopt. Her mother recently showed Charlize a letter she wrote when she was eight. “What I want for Christmas this year is for you to take me to the orphanage so that we can adopt a brother or a sister,” it read. “I don’t know where that came from,” Theron says. “Maybe it was just an awareness of the fact that at that time, orphanages were everywhere in South Africa. But even in my relationship with Stuart, that was something I was very clear about. We had very different ideas of what a family looked like. There’s no judgment; that was not the reason why we broke up, but when we did, adopting was not a last resort for me—it was almost like a first resort. And it’s the only thing in my life that’s surpassed how great I thought it would be.”
Just then, Theron spots Elizabeth, Cindy, and Jackson on the beach. As if on cue, Jackson proceeds to behave exactly as his mother described. “Looook,” coos Theron. “He’s collected all of his little friends. Now he’s got, like, fourteen kids running around. He starts out slow, and then it’s like a nation.” She goes quiet for a moment, watching him play, and her eyes well up. “My son. Right? It’s amazing how life turns out.” She wipes her eyes. “I have turned into the biggest mush.” As we get up to join them down below, we pass a table of three couples in their 50s, all dressed up in their best beach casual, laughing and toasting with their white wine glasses. “My God,” says Theron. “I feel like we’re in a Cialis ad.”
Despite the fact that Theron was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2011 for Best Actress in a Comedy for Young Adult (“That was a horror film,” she says) and appeared in two Woody Allen movies early in her career, she has never really been cast as the star—the funny person—in a true comedy until now, which comes as something of a surprise given her crack comic timing. This month, she plays just that role in Seth MacFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West, his hilarious, bawdy slapstick satire of (and love letter to) the Western genre that is sure to stir up all manner of controversy. MacFarlane has built the jokes around the story of a budding romance between his character, Albert, an ambivalent denizen of a one-saloon outpost, and Theron’s mysterious-but-beautiful new-lady-in-town, Anna. “Their relationship,” says MacFarlane, “was really key to getting away with this kind of movie, and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. She’s so fantastic that she actually makes you better.”
Despite the R-rated, boundary-pushing raunchiness on display, you can’t help but get caught up in the love story between Anna and Albert; there’s real chemistry there, and it’s only when you walk away that it dawns on you: Did I just see Charlize Theron in a romantic comedy?
“When I saw the film,” says Theron, “it was the first time in my career that I’ve ever seen myself on-screen—and it was comforting. It wasn’t like, Oh, no! I haven’t done my job! It was like, Ooooh—if there’s an element of that part of my personality that can service a story, that’s fantastic.”
Hearing this, I couldn’t help thinking that Theron has finally gotten comfortable in her own skin. When I interviewed her in the past, she felt certain that psychotherapy was not for her (this from a woman whose mother killed her father in self-defense when Charlize was fifteen). “I didn’t know that I needed therapy,” she tells me now. “I was walking through life just kind of thinking everything was fine—you go and you work and there’s this catharsis that happens when you are an actor, and that’s healthy, right?” In her early 30s, though, she found herself, inexplicably, “kind of at rock bottom. I called a friend and said, ‘Will you give me the number of your therapist?’ And I started seeing an incredible woman who is always just a phone call away.”
“She has such a fantastically magnetic personality,” MacFarlane says. “In our test screenings, people just adored her. She’s just so infectious, so warm, so generous. It was such perfect casting.” He’s right: Theron’s sweet and jocular presence is the film’s secret sauce—and provides some ballast to the kind of challenging humor that got MacFarlane into so much hot water after he hosted the Oscars in 2013. “She’s a great laugher,” he says. “I look at her like Meryl Streep in Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life. It’s my favorite movie, and Meryl Streep has such a warm presence in that film, but on top of all of that she is just a great laugher. Her laugh makes the whole movie even funnier. Her presence in that film says, Hey, this is all OK. As fucked-up as it seems, it’s all OK because Meryl says it is. That’s what Charlize does in this movie.”
All of this comes as a refreshing surprise, if not a relief. Theron has not made a movie in a while, and her last three roles—in Young Adult, Prometheus, Snow White and the Huntsman—were rather chilly ladies. When those latter two films came out within a week of each other in 2012, A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times that Theron “is doing everything she can . . . to make this an icy June at the movies.” Theron seems to relish that fact. When I mention his review she says, “A journalist once said to me—and I thought it was pretty funny—‘You know Picasso’s Blue Period? Well, you’ve really had a good bitch period.’ ”
Later this year she will star in Dark Places, a mystery, based on the Gillian Flynn novel and directed by the French writer Gilles Paquet-Brenner, that Theron developed and produced. Next year she’ll star in the Mad Max reboot, Fury Road. “We just did some reshoots in Australia,” says Theron, “but we shot the whole movie in Namibia for almost eight months and then for a month in Cape Town.” Even more intriguing, there’s been lots of buzz that Theron is going to star with Javier Bardem in The Last Face, directed by Penn. Written by Erin Dignam, it is the story of a charming and talented doctor doing humanitarian relief work in Africa amid civil unrest who must choose between romance and saving lives. When I bring it up to Theron, she cautions me that it’s not a done deal. “I mean, look—it’s as real as anything until you’re actually on the set shooting it,” she says. “That’s why we haven’t released anything, because we haven’t been green-lit. It’s a film that Javier Bardem has been walking around for a really long time and is very passionate about, and the three of us got together and said, ‘Let’s try and make this.’ We’re hoping to go to Africa to shoot it in July, but it’s tricky to talk about stuff until it’s real-real.”
The next day, Theron and a Vogue crew spend hours out on the ocean with a small armada—a WaveRunner, a paddleboard, a speedboat, a yacht—getting one shot after another. When we all get back to shore, Theron quickly changes, and she and her housemates head out to a café on the bay. As cocktails and conch fritters arrive, Jackson runs off and gathers up a new nation of big boys. The conversation at the table runs from the missing Malaysian airliner to the constant presence of the paparazzi, who are, to everyone’s surprise, crawling all over Islamorada. Not surprisingly, there is also lots of salty girl talk. Amanda eventually brings up the fact that her boyfriend does not always get the jokes—the way this group of women, especially Theron, tease one another and make fun of just about everything. “One night there was all this talk about Snow White 2,” Amanda says, referring to the sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, “and I was like, ‘Charlize, are you gonna do it?’ She said, ‘Are you kidding? Phone in that English accent and make ten million dollars? Fuck, yeah, I’m gonna do it.’ ” Theron explodes with laughter while Amanda continues. “My boyfriend was like, ‘Did you hear what she just said? Did she really mean that?’ He doesn’t really get that you’re kidding most of the time.”
“Because he thinks I am a serious asshole,” says Theron, kidding. But then she gets more thoughtful. “That was a great job, in the sense that you can hide behind this insane character, and you can do something fun—almost like a play, where you can be so over the top because the story almost demands it—and you don’t get to do that very often. With most film work, you’ve got to play in the subtle box. But every once in a while you really want to do that thing—that, like, ROOOOAAAAR.” She stops for a moment, as if startled by herself, and then says quietly, like someone who’s figured out what really matters in life, “So, yeah—I can do that again and feel totally fine.”
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