Charlize Theron has made a career for herself as both a serious actress (see “Monster”) and an action heroine in movies like “The Italian Job,” “Aeon Flux,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and many more. She says, however, the road to action stardom has not always been easy, having met obstacles like sexism and bias.
Speaking on the “Evolution of a Bada**s” panel during Comic-Con@Home this past Friday, Theron said she learned of Hollywood’s “misconception” about female action heroes when prepping for her role on “The Italian Job.”
“I realized there was still so much misconception around women in the genre,” she said, as reported by Fox News. “The only good thing that came out of that experience was that there was a real pressure to pull off those stunts with the actors – and that was the first time I experienced anything like that. But there was a very unfair process that went with that. I was the only woman with a bunch of guys, and I remember vividly getting the schedule in our preproduction and they had scheduled me for six weeks more car training than any of the guys.”
“It was just so insulting, but it was also the thing that put a real fire under my a** and I was like, ‘All right, you guys want to play this game? Let’s go,'” she continued. “I made it a point to out-drive all of those guys. I vividly remember Mark Wahlberg, halfway through one of our training sessions, pulling over and throwing up because he was so nauseous from doing 360s.”
Theron said that her position as an action movie hero changed upon her role in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”
“It wasn’t until ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ came my way — that experience and what happened with that film really changed the trajectory for me,” she said. “I don’t think I will ever recover from the making of that film.”
“There is a responsibility to hand that baton over, that it’s not just about you,” she added. “Listen, it’s still disproportionate to our male counterparts out there, and we have to keep putting the pressure on our industry to change that.”
Going forward, Theron said she wants young girls to not think of a female action hero – something that has existed since Sigourney Weaver said “get away from her, you b***h” in 1986’s “Aliens” – as something weird or out of place.
“I want my two young girls to grow up and not even think that this is weird or this is unusual or this is strange,” Theron said. “I want this to be normalized.”
Charlize Theron made headlines last year when she confessed to raising her seven-year-old adopted son as a girl ever since he was three.
“Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,” Charlize told the Daily Mail. “Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said: ‘I am not a boy!’”
“So there you go! I have two beautiful daughters who, just like any parent, I want to protect and I want to see thrive,” she continued. “They were born who they are, and exactly where in the world both of them get to find themselves as they grow up, and who they want to be, is not for me to decide.”
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