Charlize Theron is setting limits on physical transformations for roles going forward. The Academy Award winner told Allure that she will “never, ever” gain significant weight for a role again after putting on 40 pounds for “Monster” and later adding extra weight for her role in “Tully.”
“I will never, ever do a movie again and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll gain 40 pounds.’ I will never do it again because you can’t take it off,” Theron said. “When I was 27, I did ‘Monster‘. I lost 30 pounds, like, overnight. I missed three meals, and I was back to my normal weight.”
However, for the 2018 Diablo Cody feature “Tully,” it took Theron a year to get back to her normal weight prior to the film. At one point, Theron said she even called a doctor to find out why she couldn’t shed the excess pounds, telling them at the time, “I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight.” Theron recalled, “He was like, ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was.’ Nobody wants to hear that.”
The “Old Guard” actress further reflected on aging in Hollywood in the new interview, sharing, “The thing that really bums me out is that I make action movies now and if I hurt myself, I take way longer to heal than I did in my twenties. More than my face, I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow. Now, if I don’t work out for three days and I go back to the gym, I can’t walk.”
Last year, Theron told Harper’s Bazaar that she is placing a new emphasis on being a producer outside of acting after decades onscreen. “I will say, back in the day, it used to be like, you want to have some of this fame so you can go make the shit that you really want to make,” she said. “But now it’s like, I pitch shit all day long and people are like, ‘No, thanks.’ I’m like, ‘I guess that’s not cash in the bank anymore.’ And that’s nice. It’s nice that you’re making things on the merit of how good they are versus this idea of, like, ‘Oh, you’re this thing, and we want to be in business with that thing.’”
