How Charlize Theron Overcame Her Dark Family Past

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**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (0:34)
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
I've never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron. I came in wanting to talk about her storied career, which began when she was discovered barely out of her teens at a bank in Los Angeles. By her late 20s, she'd produced, starred in, and won an Oscar for the film Monster. While she's been in dark comedies like Tully and big-budget fantasy films like Snow White and The Huntsman, I was most interested in her latest turn as an action star in films like Mad Max Fury Road, Atomic Blonde, the Old Guard franchise, and her newest film Apex, where she kicks butt again, this time while being chased through the Australian wilderness. While we did talk about her roles past and present, our conversation almost immediately took a revealing turn into some of the most painful chapters in her life, I think surprising us both. That includes her experience growing up in a violent home in her native South Africa, her mother killing her father in self-defense, and the repercussions she's lived with ever since. Here's my conversation with Charlize Theron.
So we're meeting the day after the Oscars, and I was watching your acceptance speech when you won your Oscar for Monster in 2004 And you're standing on stage, you're tearing up. It's clearly just this very important moment, which of course it is for any actor. Your mom is sitting in the audience, and you thank her for all her sacrifices. When you look back now, what do you think about that young woman and what was happening at that moment?

**Charlize Theron** (2:23)
The first thing that came to mind was just, this is something that doesn't happen to girls in South Africa. Like, you know, it's like, I remember looking at a map, and I was like, God, we're all the way down here. What's going on up there? I remember like feeling very lucky that I made it out here, and like my greatest dream, like my like lottery win would have been to be able to support myself as an actor and not have a second job. Like, that was literally what I was like aiming for. Not just aiming for it, like that would have been, I just wanted to like be able to support myself, not depend on my mom or a guy, feel secure and get to do the thing that I absolutely love.
But the thing with my mom is very, I'm going to try and talk about it very professionally because I will tear up. She did sacrifice a lot.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (3:16)
Yeah, and we're going to talk about that. And you can tell just in that moment, you know, the connection, the just looking at each other.

**Charlize Theron** (3:23)
Well, I couldn't look at her. I was like, I'm not going to look at you. Like the first part of the speech, I handled it. Like I was like, like just really excited and shocked. And I was like, do not look at her, do not look at her. Because I knew that as soon as I looked at her, I was going to feel, I just knew that. Because it's, it was somewhat of a shared experience.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (3:43)
Yeah, I can see you getting emotional now.

**Charlize Theron** (3:45)
No, I'm not. I don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, yeah, it's hard not to because it's so real. You know, I'm a mom now and I don't have to sacrifice the things like she did. So I know what she did and I'm very grateful.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (4:03)
I guess since we started here, we'll talk about the movie, but since we're already talking about your family and where you came from, you grew up in South Africa on a small farm.

**Charlize Theron** (4:18)
Yeah.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (4:18)
Tell me about what you remember about growing up there and what your life was like.

**Charlize Theron** (4:26)
I remember very vividly moving to that farm. I was four years old. I remember seeing it. I remember it being feeling when I was that age, like so vast. It really was and it was like 16 acres, but it just felt like this, like vast because it had, it had, I think they were growing alfalfa on it, and one side they were growing corn on it. So it just had this kind of error of, and they had these two big reservoirs on it. And there was this big, big tree. And I don't know what tree it was, but it was kind of like it greeted you as you were driving in. And I have very, very vivid memories of this tree and climbing it, and climbing it recklessly barefoot.