To watch Charlize Theron in action in her latest, The Old Guard, is a true pleasure. Her punches are poetry in motion, lithe without being clunky, strong without being heavy. It is hard to believe that not only does she not have a martial arts background but also that she trained to be a ballerina before she made it big in Hollywood.
But then again, maybe it is not so strange, given how many times Theron has shape-shifted for her roles. From the tortured woman plagued by visions in The Devil’s Advocate (1997), widely considered to be her breakthrough role, to the doe-eyed beauty of Mighty Joe Young (1998), who does not know why people stare at her when she enters a ballroom, to the serial killer of Monster (2003), for which she won an Oscar for best actress, it would be an understatement to say that Theron’s repertoire is diverse.
This has not been by accident. She has consciously and routinely pushed the envelope by transforming herself, both physically and emotionally, in each of her roles. “Unless it is something where I really feel like I am going to go scare myself—like I am standing on a ledge and if I fall, it might be brutal and not pretty at all—I don’t really want to do it anymore,” she once said about the parts she is interested in playing. And no, playing a blue-eyed bimbo does not fall in that category. When Oprah once told her that she fit into the pretty girl box, Theron categorically refuted it.
“What’s a more interesting box for you?” Oprah asked her.
“Life,” she replied. “Everything around the box.”
This is not to say that she does not lethally deploy her sexuality when she needs to. Like in Atomic Blonde (2017), in which she plays an MI6 agent. “Women are always getting in the way of progress, aren’t they?” asks James McAvoy’s character, a misogynistic prick, in the film, a few scenes before Theron puts a bullet in him. “It’s a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver,” she says in her throaty contralto. The fact that she kills him in six-inch Manolo Blahniks feels like poetic justice for women all over the world. Not that Theron has to resort to her sex appeal to be sexy. In Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), for example, her character Furiosa, with her mud-caked face and nearly-shaved head, is more dangerously sexy than any starlet in spandex.
However, it has not been easy for her to make it as an action heroine, although she can kick butt as well as the best of them. After the failure of her first action film, Aeon Flux (2005), it took her 10 years to bag another action role in Mad Max: Fury Road as the fierce, one-armed Furiosa. “Unfortunately, the very sad truth of any film in the genre with a female lead, where they don’t succeed, there is this mindset of, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work, you just don’t touch it again’,” she said in an interview. She never gave up, and followed Fury Road with Atomic Blonde and The Fate of the Furious in 2017.
And then came The Old Guard, in which she plays the leader of a band of immortals. The movie, as such, follows a predictable route, peppered with rather maudlin dialogues and emotional scenes that seem a tad forced. But Theron is fantastic as Andy, weary, bone-tired and disillusioned with her existence. Her every posture and look conveys Andy’s brokenness. Ironically, it is from this fragility that she draws her strength. This is vintage Theron. As she once said, “There is nothing more powerful than a vulnerable woman.”