Charlize Theron and the Australian connection
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Charlize Theron first became aware of Australian director Nash Edgerton when she discovered the 2007 short film, Spider, which he directed and co-starred in with his younger brother, Joel Edgerton, also in a small role.
“I very creepily called Nash up and just said, ‘yo, I want to meet you’ and he was brave enough to sit down and meet with me,” recalls the South African actress with a grin. “I saw great promise and potential in him as a filmmaker from that short and through him I got to meet Joel and we all became really close and actively started to look for something to do together.”
Charlize Theron as Marlo and Asher Miles Fallica as Jonah star in Jason Reitman’s TULLY
Photo: Kimberly French / Focus Features
It took more than a decade but that project finally came to fruition in the action comedy Gringo, one of two very different films being released this month that showcase the diversity of the Oscar-winning actress. In Gringo, David Oyelowo stars as Harold, a mild-mannered pharmaceutical company executive who takes a business trip from Chicago to Mexico and ends up getting kidnapped and left to die when his cut-throat bosses, played by Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron, refuse to pay the ransom. In Tully, Theron stars as Marlo, the mother of three including a newborn, who is gifted the services of a night nurse and forms a unique bond with Tully, the young nanny.
Tully director Jason (Up in the Air) Reitman, who first worked with Theron in the 2011 film Young Adult, pops in during our interview at a Beverly Hills hotel to compliment her exposed performance in that drama. “I love when I get to see you vulnerable,” he gushes affectionately, to which Theron can’t help but teasingly respond, “Because I’m such a bitch in real life?” Reitman ignores her self-deprecating armor and continues, “No, we just get to see you kick so much butt in films and your access to vulnerability is really beautiful so it makes me happy when I get to see you like this on screen.”
The 42-year-old actress known for films such as Monster, Snow White and the Huntsman and Mad Max: Fury Road says her foul-mouthed Gringo character goes to any lengths to get what she wants. “I think she is very much a product of her own environment and once I understood that and made peace with that, I could embrace the narcissism and brutality of her,” she says. “But I still found myself profusely apologising to people constantly throughout the day and had moments where I was afraid to eat the food at the catering table because I might have offended seven people that day and there might be urine in this food!”
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