Hollywood had a very easy career available for Charlize Theron. Put that face in flattering light, give her expensive clothes, let everybody else react when she enters the room, repeat until retirement. She has spent an astonishing amount of time making that option look boring. Theron seems most alive when a movie gives her something beautiful and then asks what happens when beauty stops helping. Sometimes the answer is rage. Sometimes humiliation. Sometimes much more.
That may be the strangest through-line in her work. Theron rarely seems interested in being watched in the way movie stars are supposed to enjoy being watched. She is much more interesting when the character has already stopped performing properly for other people. In these five films, she plays five very different women, and Theron keeps finding the exact point where presentation breaks down and something uglier, funnier, or more honest comes through. I’ve zeroed-in on that side of Theron super well below so scroll down slowly. Let’s get started.
5
'Tully' (2018)
Image via Focus Features
In Tully, Marlo (Charlize Theron) is a mother of three who has reached the stage of exhaustion where ordinary tasks begin feeling faintly insulting. Her newborn barely sleeps, her son Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica) needs more attention than his school is willing to give him, her husband Drew (Ron Livingston) is decent but increasingly useless once night falls, and Marlo is disappearing under the repetition of feeding, cleaning, pumping, driving, comforting, and beginning again. Tully changes course when her wealthy brother pays for a night nanny named Tully (Mackenzie Davis), who starts arriving after dark and quietly gives Marlo back pieces of herself she had forgotten existed.
What I love is how little vanity Theron brings to any of this. Marlo’s body aches. Her clothes fit badly. She sits in the car eating junk food because nobody needs anything from her for thirty seconds. There is a scene where she pumps breast milk while staring forward with the dead concentration of somebody operating industrial machinery, and it is funnier than most scripted jokes about parenthood because the exhaustion is so recognizable. Tully initially seems like the fantasy version of adulthood Marlo misplaced somewhere along the way: energetic, curious, sexually confident, awake. The movie gradually makes that contrast much sadder. Motherhood has not turned Marlo into a lesser person. She has simply been asked to function for so long without enough room to remain one.
4
'Young Adult' (2011)
Image via Paramount Pictures
Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) writes young-adult novels, lives alone in Minneapolis, drinks too much, and decides that an email announcing her high-school boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson)’s new baby is somehow evidence that she should drive back to her Minnesota hometown and win him away from his wife. That is the actual plan. Young Adult follows Mavis as she returns to Mercury completely convinced that adulthood has gone wrong for everyone except her, despite almost every observable fact suggesting the opposite.
The brilliance is how long Theron allows Mavis to remain convinced of her own desirability. She wakes up hungover, applies hair extensions, puts herself together with enormous care, then walks into rooms expecting an old social hierarchy to restart automatically. Buddy is polite. His wife Beth (Elizabeth Reaser) is friendly. Nobody behaves as though Mavis has returned to reclaim the throne, which only makes her push harder. Her unlikely friendship with Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former classmate whose life was permanently changed by a brutal high-school attack, keeps puncturing the story Mavis tells herself about who actually suffered back then. And that baby-naming party is agony. She finally says aloud the fantasy she has been protecting, in front of the people least willing to participate in it. Theron never asks us to secretly admire Mavis. That refusal is exactly why I cannot look away from her.
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3
'The Cider House Rules' (1999)
Image via Miramax Films
The Cider House Rules follows Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire) growing up inside a Maine orphanage under Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine), who teaches him medicine and expects him eventually to continue the work he does there, including abortions. Homer wants to know what life looks like beyond the orphanage, so he leaves with young couple Candy Kendall (Charlize Theron) and Wally Worthington (Paul Rudd) after Wally joins the war. That premise then follows Homer into the apple orchards of the Worthington farm, where freedom turns out to carry moral complications that are much harder than anything he imagined from inside the orphanage.
Candy could easily have become the beautiful woman whose main function is to awaken Homer sexually. Theron gives her a much less comfortable emotional position. Candy loves Wally. She is lonely after he leaves. She is attracted to Homer. Those facts coexist, and the movie allows the mess rather than cleaning her up for us. Their relationship feels temporary even while both are pretending it might become something else, which gives their happiest scenes a faint tension underneath them. Candy also lives in a world where reproductive choices are being debated largely by men, and her presence keeps the story from becoming purely philosophical. Theron was still early in her career here, yet you can already see that instinct to resist making a woman easier simply because the audience would prefer her that way.
2
'Monster' (2003)
Image via Newmarket Films
Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron) is a sex worker living at the edge of survival in Florida when she meets Selby Wall (Christina Ricci) and falls desperately in love with the possibility of building an ordinary life with her. After Aileen kills a client who violently attacks her, she begins murdering other men she encounters through sex work, taking their money and vehicles while telling herself that each new act belongs to the same logic as the first. Monster follows that progression without turning Aileen into either a misunderstood saint or a horror-show exhibit.
People understandably talked about Theron’s physical transformation, but reducing this performance to weight gain, makeup, and false teeth almost insults what she is doing. Watch Aileen when she tries to get a normal job. She walks into offices with no résumé, no experience anyone wants to acknowledge, no understanding of the social performance expected of her, and growing fury that the world is not impressed by her desire to start over. Or watch how she behaves around Selby. Watch how she changes. Suddenly Aileen wants to be funny, generous, protective, almost boyishly impressive. She keeps promising a future she has no realistic way to finance. The killings become increasingly indefensible, and Theron never softens that. What she does preserve is the uncomfortable fact that Aileen still experiences herself as a person with hopes while becoming somebody capable of terrible things. That is much harder to watch than a monster.
1
'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)
Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
On top, of course, we have Mad Max: Fury Road. The movie is about an escape as Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) unleashes his War Boys after them in a weird desert area in a dystopian world. Max (Tom Hardy) gets dragged into the pursuit, and almost the entire movie becomes one long argument over whether freedom exists somewhere beyond the horizon. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) drives a War Rig for tyrant Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). She is supposedly heading out to collect gasoline and ammunition across the wasteland. Then she deliberately takes the rig off route. Hidden inside are Joe’s five wives, women Furiosa is attempting to smuggle away from sexual slavery and take to the Green Place she remembers from childhood.
Furiosa is one of the best female action characters of the century because the movie has absolutely no interest in stopping to congratulate itself for her. She knows the War Rig better than anyone. She shoots straighter than Max when the moment requires it. She has a prosthetic arm and uses it like a tool rather than a backstory prompt. Furiosa spends the movie trying to get away from power and ends it realizing the only real escape is taking that power apart. It’s a brilliant film and her character even got a separate prequel, which was played by (Anya Taylor-Joy).
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