After a hiatus from leading roles, Charlize Theron returns full-on with this month's Young Adult, a film that showcases her Oscar-worthy talents—and the liberating energy of her newly single life.
“We should keep it classy,” Charlize Theron says.
It’s a warm autumn evening in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting with Theron at a near-empty Japanese restaurant. Up the road, Barack Obama is wooing the beautiful and boldfaced at a $17,900-a-plate fund-raiser, and for hours, the Hollywood sky has rattled with helicopters. But this feels like a much better place to be, across a small table from the 36-year-old native South African and Oscar winner who director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno) says is “in every conversation about the greatest living actresses.” There’s also sake, poured in wooden boxes filled to the brim, so that one has no choice but to lean over, inelegantly dip one’s nose, and slurp it like a Labrador retriever. Which now I do.
Theron laughs loudly. “That’s why I ordered it,” she says. “To make you do that.”
I’d been warned about Theron. Good warnings. She is an actress who doesn’t take herself seriously, who loathes phoniness, who chooses not to live in a gilded fantasy of air kisses and fake compliments, and is not afraid of an adult beverage, a pointed jab, or a scattering of F-bombs.
Click here to see a slideshow of Charlize Theron throughout the years in Vogue.
“She’s a lottttt of fun,” says her friend the actor Jason Bateman.
This rowdy image amuses Theron. “She swears! She drinks you under the table!” she says, writing her own headline.
For the record, in our two days together, Theron does not drink me under the table, though I stop counting the F-bombs after 50. She will mock my voice, and when I move too slowly for her, she will refer to me as “Grandpa.” We will be photographed together by the paparazzi, causing Theron to speculate we will soon be described by the tabloids as “getting it on.” (A prospect fine by me and comical to my wife but surely mortifying for Theron.) That said, we will do the most intimate, soul-baring thing two people can do: exchange music.
We do not keep it totally classy. Somehow, Theron will get me kicked out of a coffee shop, which I didn’t think was possible.
Click here to see a slideshow of Charlize Theron's best red carpet moments.
She is so unpretentious and easygoing, it gets to the point where you almost forget that she’s Charlize Theron, until she rises from her restaurant chair in her light-brown sweater and Rag & Bone jeans and reveals what her producing partner, Beth Kono, describes as a “freaking five-foot-ten genetic mutation”—what Patton Oswalt, her costar in the upcoming Jason Reitman–directed Young Adult, refers to as “a nerd locked in a grace machine on automatic pilot.”
Theron is not what you’d expect. But it’s true: She’s a lot of fun.
“Did you get hit at all?” Bateman asks later. “A South African love tap? Those can bring bruises.”
The Charlize Theron story is not supposed to happen. The teenage girl who leaves the farm in South Africa to be a fashion model in Milan does not actually become a fashion model. The fashion model who tries to become a dancer does not get admitted to the prestigious Joffrey Ballet School. The injured ballerina who goes to Hollywood to be an actress doesn’t become an actress. Somewhere along the way, reality intrudes on the dream.
But Theron pulled it off. There were early signals she could—stolen scenes as a bombshell girlfriend in 2 Days in the Valley; as a “polymorphously perverse” supermodel straddling a New York Knick in Woody Allen’s Celebrity. There were celebrated films everyone saw (Cider House Rules), and brash ones few did (Reindeer Games). In 2003, there was a breakthrough: an acclaimed performance in Monster, for which Theron physically transformed herself to play the prostitute turned serial killer Aileen Wuornos. She would win awards, including the big one.
“The Golden Frog, you’re talking about?” Theron asks coyly.
Winning the Oscar was “amazing,” she says. The night she was up for it, in a shimmering Gucci dress, she felt “like a princess.” At the last second, Diane Lane switched her seat so Theron’s mother, Gerda, could be next to her when the envelope was opened.
“It was life-changing—it opened a lot of doors,” says Theron, who was nominated again for 2005’s North Country. “But it made people have a lot of opinions about what should happen next. You realize quickly that you can never please everybody.”
Today, Theron has her own production company, Denver and Delilah, with projects ranging from films to reality TV. There is her foundation, Africa Outreach Project, where the primary mission is reducing HIV/AIDS and sexual violence among African youth. Last summer, during South Africa’s historic World Cup, the foundation broke ground on four soccer fields in rural communities, far from the sports-crazed spotlight.
Though Los Angeles is her home, Theron is in it but not of it. The celebrity machinery doesn’t interest her much.
“For a woman that beautiful and that intelligent, she has a very down-to-earth approach to life,” says Shirley Mac*Laine, who befriended Theron after an awards ceremony in which an awestruck Theron planted a playful kiss on MacLaine’s behind. “She has opted for simplicity, and that is a very wise choice.”
Theron chooses films carefully, often passing over the easy money for projects she strongly believes in, films like Young Adult, the second movie from the celebrated Juno pairing of Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody, which opens this month. In it, Theron plays Mavis Gary, a lonely, binge-drinking writer of serial teen romances who makes an awkward return to her Minnesota hometown, trying to win back her married high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (played by Patrick Wilson). Mavis is a hot mess—icy and self-absorbed on the surface, but reeling underneath.
Theron was offered the part after she introduced herself to Reitman at the Oscars. “I did that horrible, embarrassing thing,” she says, shaking her head. She mocks herself talking to the then 33-year-old director after a couple of glasses of champagne: “ ‘I just really, really, really loved Up in the Air.’ ”
But Reitman didn’t need a sell. “Really the only way I was going to do this movie was if Charlize wanted to do it,” he says of Young Adult. “It’s a really tricky screenplay to pull off, because the main character is so unlikable.”
Theron went all in. To see Mavis in an oversize Hello Kitty T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, gorging on Diet Coke, fast food, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is to witness a slow unraveling. Theron gave Mavis a pigeon-toed walk, which she says is based on Reitman’s shuffle. She added hair extensions and stuffed silicone cutlets into Mavis’s bra—the latter a detail she lifted from a romantic episode in her own life. “I was on this date and started making out, and it was moving a little further, so I realized I had to get the cutlets out,” Theron recalls. “But my bag was small, and I couldn’t fit them in the thing. Jason [Reitman] was like, ‘No way. That doesn’t happen!’ But that stuff happens to girls all the time.”
Whatever happened to the cutlets?
Theron pauses. “I may have hid them in his trash with lots of toilet paper.”
The end result is another indelible Theron character. Young Adult is funny but not a lighthearted romantic comedy. The movie revels in the painful awkwardness of real life, the feelings of isolation that often lurk below the surface. Late in the film, there’s a scene in which a furious Mavis, her shirt soaked in red wine, rages at partygoers outside Buddy’s happy suburban house. It is both hard to watch and utterly believable. “Never for a moment do you feel you’re watching an actress who’s letting you know, ‘By the way, I’m nothing like this character,’ ” says Reitman. “She’s diving 100 percent in.”
“I admit, deep down, I was concerned because Charlize is so gorgeous,” says Cody. “It’s important to me to populate the films I write with real people, and she looks like an international supermodel, you know? And yet, she managed to channel her beauty into this homecoming-queen sense of superiority that Mavis never let go of. She’s incredibly convincing.”
“She lays it out there, man,” says Oswalt, who plays a forgotten high school classmate who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Mavis.
I ask Theron if she ever had a lost teenage love—a real-life version of Young Adult’s Buddy Slade.
“I didn’t have a high school boyfriend,” she confesses. “But there was this guy, Johan Botha, who I was obsessed with. Obsessed! There was a school dance coming up, and I told my mom I needed a dress, and I bought this amazing crushed-velvet burgundy dress—long-sleeved, off-the-shoulder, at Woolworth’s. And then Thursday came, and Friday came, and he did not ask me to the dance. And I had to call my mom to come get me.
“Johan Botha! I haven’t thought about him in so long. He was a really good cyclist. I think I spoke five words to him. I would lie in my bed and listen to those heartbreak eighties songs and think it was the end of the world that this boy did not know I existed.”
A week or so later, I locate Johan Botha via e-mail. He’s an artist, living in Johannesburg, still riding his bicycle, and singing and playing guitar in a band called Billy Buckle.
“Haha, yes we were in school together,” Botha writes of Theron. “If you interview her again, you may tell her that the crush was definitely mutual, for what it’s worth.
“Oh, and she wore glasses at the time, which I thought was very cute.”
Young Adult is a music-driven movie—the opening credits launch with an old Memorex cassette playing a poppy Teenage Fanclub song called “The Concept”; Mavis howls the 4 Non Blondes anthem “What’s Up?” from her Mini Cooper; Patton Oswalt’s character pads around in a Pixies T-shirt. Before filming, Reitman gave Theron mix tapes labeled MAD LOVE, BUDDY designed to get her in the mood. “Best rehearsal I’ve ever had,” Theron says.
Inspired by this theme, it has been proposed that I make a mix tape for Theron, and that Theron make one for me. Had this idea been suggested to me in, say, 1987, I’d have aced it, but my mix-tape skills have atrophied. A good mix tape is an intimate endeavor, and it’s strange to make one for someone you hardly know, and for a famous person at that (and now everyone makes them with iTunes, which feels like cheating).
Still, I try. I avoid anything that sounds too weird or personal or stalkery. I start to search for tracks with titles related to Theron’s career—Kanye West’s “Monster,” for example—but that gets corny. Eventually I just give up and make a mix that I’d listen to: Jackson Browne, Jay-Z, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Ginuwine, Evan Dando, R.E.M. It’s the kind of mix you might play stoned in a vintage Saab. At the last moment I add a filthy single (“Fish Paste”) by a South African hip-hop group named Die Antwoord, whom I saw at a concert in New York a summer ago. Will she like it? I have no idea if she’ll listen to it.
Young Adult is Theron’s first major movie role in three years, and in the middle of filming she had a revelation. “I realized how much I love what I do,” she says. “I really, really missed it. Like around week three, I had this horrible, sappy moment where I got a little overwhelmed. It was just a really great ****ing experience.”
She hesitates. “I’d gotten out of a relationship, and I was in this really floaty place. My feet weren’t touching the ground. I just kind of turned to [Reitman] and was like, ‘I feel like me again.’ ”
The relationship, of course, was Theron’s longtime partnership with the Irish actor Stuart Townsend, whom she dated for almost ten years. When the pairing began to falter, Theron says, she was desperate to save it; acting took a backseat. “It was sinking, and I had to give it a fight,” she says. “I really wanted to try and make it work. That was the priority. I wouldn’t do it any different way.”
As we meet, Theron is single—a foreign experience. “I’ve never been single,” she says. “This is the first time in my life. From the time I was nineteen, I’ve been in relationships, literally gone from one to the other within a month.
“It’s been good for me,” she continues. “I’m a creature who’s really found her comfort zone in relationships.”
We are eating ice cream across the street from the Japanese restaurant. To be specific, we are sitting at a table outside a coffee shop next to the ice-cream store, because all the tables outside the ice-cream store are taken.
“It’s been nice to rediscover myself,” Theron says. “I had to make a real conscious effort to do it—it’s hard. It’s much easier to lose yourself in flowers and cigarettes and coffee with somebody else.”
Suddenly a barista appears at the table. “Just to let you know, these tables are for customers only.”
Theron apologizes and bolts up from the table. And with that, the barista officially has a story titled “The Time I Kicked Charlize Theron Out of My Coffee Shop.”
Fleeing the scene in her car, Theron is howling. “We ran away with our tails between our legs,” she says, slapping at the steering wheel. “I finished my ice cream in front of a garbage can!”
Suddenly, she swerves aggressively to take a turn. “****,” she says. She sees me coiling in my seat, gripping the door.
“Don’t worry,” Theron says, pumping the brakes. “Italian Job! Do you remember that movie? I won’t brag about anything, but I’m a really good driver.”
She pulls her car in front of my hotel. We make a plan to meet for a hike the next morning. A high-five is exchanged.
“Eww,” Theron says. “Did we just high-five?”
Does anyone know where we could find the video? I am sure they will put it on itunes at some point but it may be several months before that 
(and style wise it is a win for me. May make up for the Vogue cover 
