Charlize Theron Is Still Pushing Herself to the Limit
11 min readMore than three hours into the opening ceremony of the Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games, after the Parade of Nations, the tenor, and the interpretive dance, the stadium went suddenly quiet at the appearance of Charlize Theron. In an Atelier Versace gown, the UN Messenger of Peace looked every bit a goddess, sharing a message of inclusivity—“regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste, or any other social markers of difference”—from her South African countryman Nelson Mandela.
“It is interesting how timely that quote is, spreading a message of acceptance. More of it is really needed right now, so I was incredibly honored to do that,” Theron says a few weeks after the event. And then, in less exalted tones: “I was also like, ‘I’ll never get asked to do anything like this again. How fucking cool is this?’ But we had to do it right. And I’ve gotten more of a reaction out of that than probably my last three movies altogether.”
Blouse, Carolina Herrera. Ring, Dior Fine Jewelry. Boots, Christian Louboutin.
That streak seems likely to change with her appearance in the summer’s most anticipated film, The Odyssey, out July 17. Given that Theron is your first call when you need a literal embodiment of world peace, observers began dream-casting her in the Christopher Nolan project as soon as it was announced. “Who else could even believably play the Greek goddess of war and wisdom? Are we sure Charlize Theron isn’t actually Athena?” wrote one fan site. Others assumed Theron would play the vengeful sorceress Circe. After all, wrote GQ, “Theron as a powerful enchantress who turns men into pigs is pretty intuitive casting.”
But on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, Theron confirms that she is instead going to play—oops, hold up, her dog Lucca has broken into the room, barking like Cerberus at the gates. Theron jumps from her chair with a stream of apologies. “My dog’s like, ‘No, don’t tell them anything!’ ” she jokes about the notoriously secretive project. In conversation, Theron is warm, thoughtful, and medium intimidating. She curses prolifically and bursts into a huge laugh when I ask her to tell me more about what she’s wearing. (The answer, it turns out, is a denim barn jacket thrown over the gym clothes she wore for her morning workout.) With Lucca wrangled and sent to play with the actress’s other two rescue dogs, she settles in to tell as much as she’s allowed.
The role Nolan had in mind for Theron from the start is the sea nymph Calypso, who, in Homer’s telling, keeps Odysseus captive on her island for seven years. Calypso is a mass of contradictions, a lustrous goddess powerful enough to hold Odysseus but powerless to make him want to stay—or to overrule Zeus when he orders her to release her lover home to his wife. So, I ask Theron, is Calypso a villain, a tragic figure, or just a woman who fixates, as many of us have, on an unavailable man?
Top, Mugler.
“I see her as all of those things and also none of those things,” she says, adding that she relishes playing one of the saga’s least-known characters. “I was given a chance to do something that I haven’t had a ton of opportunity to do, because she’s a little bit of everything. That’s what’s so beautiful about her. And a lot of people on their own cast me in this movie, and they cast me very differently. It was a real opportunity that Chris gave me to do something that didn’t feel like typecasting.”
Throughout Greek mythology, the gods rape and kidnap mortal women with impunity. Calypso’s signature speech comes when she calls out their double standard—one where goddesses who sleep with men, even after marrying them, are met with cruel jealousy. “I feel a lot of her heartbreak lies in that hypocrisy,” Theron says. “Even though she’s a goddess, she is really longing for connection. And it was interesting to look at somebody with the powers that she has, but who still really couldn’t do that much with them. And not that I want to make a direct correlation to it, but there’s something to be said about women living their lives today in a powerful manner, and yet a lot of our rights are being taken away every single day.”
Nolan, who calls Theron “just one of the great actresses of her generation,” says he admires her ability, in films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Monster (for which she won the Best Actress Oscar in 2004), to create iconic, larger-than-life characters while also projecting their inner life. “Charlize fully embraced the high-wire act we wanted to pull off with this character,” the director says. “It’s a character who, throughout the history of literature and art, has been interpreted in so many contradictory ways, and trying to square the circle of that character required somebody of Charlize’s intellect and empathetic ability.”
Top, skirt, Bottega Veneta.
Her scene partner was Matt Damon, a close friend since they costarred in The Legend of Bagger Vance more than 26 years ago. “By the way, I don’t know why only one of us aged. She won the genetic lottery,” Damon says with a laugh. “She’s somebody I’ve always really rooted for because if you know her, it’s impossible not to root for her. She’s just a formidable woman and a great, great actress.” The stand-in for Calypso’s island, he says, was a Moroccan beach famed for its windsurfing and kiteboarding. The location has an otherworldly, purgatorial feel that was visually ideal—but neither actor had fully thought through what it would feel like to film there.
“She had to do these scenes that were already challenging with a 30- to 40-mile-an-hour wind ripping sand into her eyes,” Damon recalls. “She’s just a boss, though. The grips were trying to hold screens over, anything that we could do so that we could shoot. But even with all that stuff, she was in massive discomfort, and you wouldn’t know it from seeing the movie. I’ve known her for so long, and she is one of those people who won’t complain, ever. And so, when she finally had to say, ‘I literally—I’m so sorry, I can’t keep my eyes open,’ she was angry. I think that was probably tougher on her than anything. And I’m like, ‘Charlize, no human being could keep their eyes open, this is ridiculous. Why didn’t you say something earlier?’ That’s her. She is seriously tough.”
Theron agrees that the conditions were beyond anything they anticipated. “I got there and I realized: To be the windsurfing capital of the world, you need a lot of wind,” she says. “That was brutal. But it was also incredible, because you felt like you were in the space where Calypso would have come from.” The result is a film that “feels big and original, dare I say, from a story that we feel like we all know.” The degree of difficulty when taking on the classics, she says, is the whole appeal. “They’re big stories to tell, and they’re intimidating. People will always attempt it because it is truly the Everest. You just want to try to climb it.”
Jacket, pants, Max Mara. Earring (worn as brooch), Dior Fine Jewelry.
And then there is the actual mountain climbing. Incredible as it sounds, The Odyssey is only the second-most physically challenging of Theron’s movies this year, following the Netflix thriller Apex from director Baltasar Kormákur. The actress trained with legendary climber Beth Rodden to prepare for her role as a grieving rock climber on a punishing trek into the Australian wilderness. The star estimates about 98 percent of the climbing—including the harrowing free solo climb out of a gorge at the film’s climax—was her own. On the second day of shooting, she jumped at least 30 feet off a cliff into seven feet of water. The cast and crew often drove two hours and hiked up to an hour longer to get to their locations, flying some equipment in on helicopters and carrying the rest. At the end of the day, before the sun set, they turned around and hiked back.
Theron likens it—positively—to a Marine boot camp. “This was one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had,” she says. “It is special when you get to shoot in locations like that and really feel affected by them. You’re not manufacturing anything. And I loved the team and I really loved working with Baltasar. I think all of us had a certain personality of wanting to push harder. And when you put a group of those kinds of people together, it’s pretty amazing what they can accomplish.”
Kormákur, the Icelandic director of Beast and Everest, recalls hiking to one location that could only be reached by wading through icy water; when he looked over at Theron, she had given the gear intended to keep her warm to a shivering crewmember. “The thing about Charlize, as tough as she might come off, she’s also very vulnerable,” he says. “But it makes her kind of cooler. It’s the juxtaposition of vulnerability and toughness that makes her who she is.” On an arduous shoot, things got heated more than once—but, he says, “the harder it got with Charlize, the more we started to like each other.”
Apex is one of about two dozen projects the actress and her partners, A. J. Dix and Beth Kono, have developed through her production company, now called Secret Menu, including Long Shot, Bombshell, Young Adult, and Tully. Given her love of the film community, Theron says producing was a natural progression. “I knew pretty early on that I didn’t want to just go and act and then go back to my trailer and wait for the next scene,” she says. “But I have felt, maybe more honestly, in the last year that there is an element that I can’t deny of wanting to have a certain amount of control over my work. For me, collaboration is one of the most important things about creating, but I like having a title, a job where I can step in and try to protect the thing that we originally set out to make. Sometimes that was hard for me earlier in my career.”
Top, Dior. Earrings, rings, bracelet, Dior Fine Jewelry.
While it feels good to have agency, she’d like to see it for actresses further down the call sheet. “I feel like I’m in a place of incredible privilege,” she says. “Not that I didn’t work hard to get here—God, I broke my back to get here—but I realize that my story and my fight is so different from a lot of women who are amazing actors who work constantly but are not in a position to maybe say, ‘Listen, I want equal pay.’ Those actors have not been taken care of.”
South African actress Thuso Mbedu, star of The Woman King and the upcoming Children of Blood and Bone, recalls how Theron lent her platform to elevate Mbedu’s when she made the move to Hollywood. When they met at an event for the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP), the actress’s powerhouse charity, “I was basically a blip on the radar, and she had a million people vying for her attention,” Mbedu says. “But she has that superpower where she makes you feel like the only person in the room.” Mbedu adds that she is “selfishly taking notes” on Theron’s leadership at the charity, founded in 2007 to team with groups in Southern Africa to combat HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence. “The impact is massive, but it’s the way she does it that sticks with me,” she notes. “I’ve been on the ground with some of CTAOP’s partners back home, and the feedback is always the same: ‘They actually listen.’”
Dress, Vivienne Westwood Couture.
The charity’s work has been challenging under the second Trump administration, which has slashed, suspended, and reorganized U.S. foreign aid programs. A paper in the Journal of the International AIDS Society conservatively estimated that a mere 90-day pause in HIV/AIDS treatment and funding could cause the death of over 100,000 people in a year. “These cuts have devastated countries and devastated lives, and killed a lot of people already and a lot of children. I don’t think people want to actually look at that,” Theron says. “At CTAOP, we’re just figuring out how we can get our funding. And on my end, having the stage that I have, I do feel like it’s not a responsibility. It’s just part of my humanity.”
It’s a compassionate view of the world she hopes to teach her two daughters, almost 11 and 14; she’s proud to see her elder daughter’s passion for volunteering at animal shelters. “They both have really big, good hearts. It’s not necessarily through my work, but I can tell that they’re thinking outside of their own bubble, and that to me feels good as a mom,” Theron says. Her girls keep her in line—“when I get too big for my britches, they surely let me know that I’m supposed to make lunch for them at 6:00 a.m.”—and in return, she tries to keep them grounded. “I tell them, ‘Just you be you.’ It’s so much harder for girls these days, I think, than when I was a teenager. When they get lost in it, I remind them they’re such powerhouses. They just need to remember that. Stay there. That’s probably the daily thing I remind them of—and to unload the dishwasher.”
With The Odyssey behind her, Theron’s focus is on the Amazon MGM Studios film Tyrant, set in New York’s high-end restaurant world. “I’m living at three-Michelin-star restaurants right now. This kind of research is easy,” says Theron, who will star with Julia Garner and produce alongside her partners. Despite her previous cameo as Clea Strange in the Marvel universe, Theron says she’s “not the person to ask” about speculation she’ll appear in Avengers: Doomsday. Nor does it seem Atomic Blonde 2 is moving forward: “I think we might’ve passed the moment.” But she is booked and busy with other projects in development, including Alfonso Cuarón’s fantasy-drama Jane and Two for the Money, a heist movie that teams Theron with director Justin Lin, a fellow alum of the Fast & Furious franchise.
Jacket, pants, Max Mara. Earring (worn as brooch), Dior Fine Jewelry.
Theron is not one to mythologize her own epic career. She sees no through line, no grand plan, beyond the desire to play characters who feel like real human beings. Still, she says, “I have vivid memories of everything that that I’ve done—really vivid, sometimes fever-dream-like memories. I remember standing in a field with Michael Caine on The Cider House Rules, feeling so starstruck. There are moments on Fury Road I can still feel—being in that rig, driving in that desert. When I talk about that movie, I can taste the dust.”
What’s most apparent is that she is not a person to leave gas in the tank. “There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to come home and regret something and be like, ‘God, why didn’t we do that? Why didn’t I try that? Or, why wasn’t I more prepared?’ So my philosophy—which I think comes from my dance background—is that you are going to work really hard at this and then you’re going to have one shot onstage, so you’d better give it everything you have,” she says. “It does apply to everything in your life in a weird way. If you’re going to clean a floor, don’t just do half of it—finish the job properly. If you’re going to do it, do it right, do it to the max. Don’t fuck around.”
Lead Image: Jacket, Max Mara.
Hair by Adir Abergel at A-Frame Agency; makeup by Kate Lee at Forward Artists; manicure by Emi Kudo for Dior Le Baume; set design by Marla Weinhoff at 11th House Agency; produced by Alexey Galetskiy Productions.
This story appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ELLE.