The very sexy actress Charlize Theron (who is starring in the new film Mad Max: Fury Road) is the latest cover girl for Esquire magazine’s May issue! Inside read all about what she has to say about her new film, her relationship with Sean Penn, her Oscar win and more!
About her relationship with Mad Max: Fury Road co-star Tom Hardy – “We fuckin’ went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George [Miller, the director] went at it. It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot. We shot a war movie on a moving truck—there’s very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometimes. And it’s material that’s really frightening—we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously.
Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be—and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes. I’d rather have that honesty working with someone than someone who fake-smiles through something—especially for actors, when your job is to go for the emotional truth. When you’re with somebody and you don’t feel like you’re in their emotional truth, then you don’t trust them. I think good actors go all the way.
If you want to be a safe actor, and you emotionally protect yourself from things getting out of hand, the performance will show all of that. Anyone who really, really, really goes into the deep dark corners of what emotional truth is, as somebody who works opposite of that, you have to be grateful for that. I beg for that. I beg for that on a job, that potency to the stew that makes it that magic that it is.” She leaves for a minute and comes back with a self-portrait Hardy painted and left in her trailer as a wrap gift, with a red handprint on the back and an inscription: “You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also fucking awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.” “We drove each other crazy, but I think we have respect for each other, and that’s the difference. This is the kind of stuff that nobody wants to understand—there’s a real beauty to that kind of relationship.”
On her relationship with Sean Penn – “We’ve been friends for twenty years. He was married, I was in a long-term relationship, our spouses—not regularly, but we were in each other’s lives. I think our friendship stemmed from mutual respect—more on my end, because I really didn’t have a body of work twenty years ago, but my love and passion for making films—that was our common ground. And also, Sean liked to have conversations outside of just making movies. That’s sometimes hard to find among friends here, and that’s where our friendship really blossomed. A lot of people want to tell you the answer to solving all of Africa’s problems from what they’ve seen on CNN. Sean is not that guy.
When he started working in Haiti and I started working on the AIDS front in South Africa, we spent a lot of time talking about those worlds. I think that for both of us there was never a moment where we thought that this—what we have today—would ever even be a possibility. Evereverever. I think we’re both finding ourselves at this moment in our lives kind of shocked. Both of us. Just when you think you know how things are supposed to go down, life just kicks you in the ass and guess what? You don’t have a clue. It is nice to be in something where the friendship came first. I’ve never had that. There’s a weight to the relationship already that I don’t think you have when you just meet somebody and enter a relationship.
There’s a foundation of twenty years that the two of us have shared with each other in all these different ways that is really the foundation of something that has brought a lot of beautiful things into my life. We get so stuck in wanting to predict the future that we forget the moment that we’re in. And the moment that we’re in is just really good. It’s really good, really nice. The marriage thing is always so strange to me anyway. I love the possibility of anything, but I’m really enjoying myself and the everyday moment and how that coincides with my son and my life and my friends. I’m a very, very, very lucky girl. Very lucky. He’s hot. He is hot. How do you say that in an interview? You’re a forty-year-old woman sounding like a sixteen-year-old. There’s something beautiful about that, but you lack the articulation of really saying what it’s like when somebody walks into your life and makes you see something that you really never thought you’d be able to see. If somebody had said to me, ‘This is what it will be,’ I would’ve said, ‘Fuck off.’ As you can see, it makes me smile.”Hi Tami,
On Monster and her Oscar win – “I’m very proud of it. We couldn’t sell that movie to save our lives—we were going to sign a deal to just release it on video. A lot of people didn’t want to buy in to how horrific her story was. ‘You can’t do that’ is all I kept hearing when we were editing. But what if that’s the truth? You should be able to tell her story as a human being with all her flaws. You should be able to do that. People give in. They end up with a movie that’s not the movie they set out to go and make. People buckle. Not that we had any ground to stand on, but we never buckled. We believed that we had worked hard enough to earn some kind of understanding. That’s something that’s very rare. Very rare. That was shit-scary, to invest that much time and go, I’d rather just sign this off to Blockbuster knowing it’s the movie we set out to make. None of us got paid. We worked our balls off. This should be the prize.”
