Charlize Theron and the evolution of badass female heroes

Actress, producer, and all-around badass Charlize Theron reflects on her roles as an action hero during her Q&A for Comic-Con@Home. Moderator Terri Schwartz from IGN brings the questions and topics from Theron’s roles in Æon Flux to The Old Guard’s Andromache, Mad Max: Fury Road’s Furiosa to Atomic Blonde’s Lorraine Broughton.

Watching the Q&A with Charlize Theron

For the last two decades, Charlize Theron has changed the action genre for good. She has paved the way for women in the hero roles to become normalized. Schwartz asked if there was a defining moment in Theron’s life when she realized she would shift her career to entirely action. The answer was no, but she knew that this was always something she wanted to do.

“I think I just always wanted to explore it [the action genre], I never had the opportunity to…I was raised with a mother who loved Chuck Norris movies and Charles Bronson movies. And my dad loved the Mad Max films. I was raised on action films.”

Q&A Highlights

When Æon Flux came out in 2004, it did not do very well. Charlize Theron felt that because of that, she may not get another chance to do action films. However, Mad Max: Fury Road came her way, and that changed the course of her career.

While filming Italian Job, Theron was given six weeks of more car training than her male counterparts. This was at first insulting, but her mindset became “okay, then bring it on!”

Charlize Theron goes on to say:

“I do believe society has us still in this somewhat ‘Madonna-whore-complex’ box where we can be either really good hookers or we can be really good mothers. But anything in between, people are sometimes not brave enough to want to go and explore. And it’s so sad to me because the richness of those stories are not actually not only great entertaining stories to tell…but it’s a great disservice to women in general. We are more complicated than those two things, and we can be many things. That our strengths can come from our faults and from our mistakes and from our petty and from our vulnerabilities and our madness. Those are the things that make us interesting.”

This question and answer session was inspiring. Hearing about how hard Charlize Theron has to work to bring women into the action genre is incredible. Having women working on action films as both makers and actors should be more normal today. With women like Theron at the forefront, it becomes more and more possible.

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