Charlize Theron: This Beauty Is Her Own "Beast"

Beautiful, tall, blonde actress and former ballerina Charlize Theron danced with the devil as Keanu Reeves' wife in Devil's Advocate, drove a little Mini-Cooper all over L.A. in The Italian Job and she was a loving beauty to a King Kong-like gorilla in Mighty Joe Young. In her new film Monster, the South African-born beauty plays another kind of beast, a serial killer; a woman so warped by years on the street that she began killing the men who approached her for sex. The real Aileen Wuornos was executed in Florida after being on death row for twelve years.

All Hollywood is talking about the amazing transformation Charlize makes to play Wuornos. She munched on tons of potato chips and pizza and gained over 30 pounds, put on buck teeth, no make up, brown contacts and ratty clothes. She managed to slouch. Aileen is 5'3". Charlize stands 5' 11". When I saw the movie, for a while I was wondering... 'where is Charlize? Isn't she in this?' Wow! She's been nominated for a Golden Globe award and is a sure bet for an Oscar-nomination for her role. [Warning: This movie is R-rated for sex and violence and deserves the rating.]

We were lucky to be able to sit down with the busy actress who has lost the weight and looked lovely in brown skirt, high collared blouse, heels and long dangle earrings.

TeenHollywood: What did you do to gain all the weight you had to gain for this film? And, what did you do to take it back off?

Charlize: Well, you eat all the stuff that you really want to eat [laughs], for the first months, and then you get bored of that. I love potato chips. I'm a potato chip kind of girl, so that's my bad thing. I could live off of potato chips. I ate a lot of creamy, cheesy stuff, which I love too. Billy Bob Thornton told me that, when he gained all the weight, the thing that helped him a lot was eating very late at night and going straight to bed, so I had a lot of late meals and room service at midnight. I would throw the cream in my face and then go to sleep. While I was shooting was the hardest because, when I work, I tend to have no appetite. I get so caught up in the work and so busy. But then, losing it is not as much fun, I have to say. [Laughs] Your best friend becomes the treadmill, and it's tough. It took me about 7 weeks, but I had to go straight into another film, so that really helped with the discipline. I really didn't have a choice in the matter. I'd go to fittings on the other movie and be like, "Oh, god, I can't fit into these clothes. I'm going to faint."

TeenHollywood: Did you ever go out in public as Aileen to see if you would be believed?

Charlize: No. I didn't. I didn't have time to make it personal. The only thing I wore a lot was the teeth because I had to learn to speak all over again with the teeth. It's like having a retainer [talking with a lisp] tho ewrything thounded like thissss. [laughter].

TeenHollywood: Did you have any doubt that you could do this role?

Charlize: Yeah, all the time. I think there were some times that I tried to talk Patty [the film's writer/director] out of it. Patty just had such a belief in me, right from day one, that it was almost hard to comprehend where it came from. I had never met this woman and, for some reason, with the body of work that I had, she saw it. There hasn't been a filmmaker, in my career, that had seen that kind of capability, ever. So, I was thrown by that. I was excited by that, but also really scared of not being able to deliver.

TeenHollywood: What brought on that doubt for you?

Charlize: Well, the biggest thing is the reality that this is not just a character, it's a real life person. It's somebody's life, and I don't take that lightly. I wanted to leave this movie being able to live with myself. There's a huge responsibility, when you're telling somebody else's life. You can't take that for granted and make that just a light thing, and do what you feel is right. It's very specific work, and I wanted to always be aware of that aspect of the story.

TeenHollywood: Were you concerned that the audience wouldn't believe you as this character if you opted to use a lot of make-up?

Charlize: Yes. When you have a lot of money in your budget, you tend to, automatically, go to prosthetics and fat suits, and things like that. Because we didn't have a budget for any of those things, the make-up became very minimal and we had to work with what we had. Toni G., who did the make-up and designed this, is an incredible make-up artist. She comes from studying with Rick Baker for years. I called Rick, because I had done Mighty Joe Young with him, and he introduced me to her. She just has an incredible eye for taking my face and highlighting the slightest little thing on my nose, or somewhere, that just, all of a sudden, became Aileen. It was like the slightest touch of hand just changed it completely. And also, I didn't want it to be a caricature. I didn't want people to just stare at the make-up the entire time of the movie. The greatest thing that I could hope for -- which is an impossible thing to hope for because there has been so much emphasis put on the transformation -- is that people can go and see it and almost get past all of that.

TeenHollywood: How did you get into the emotional make-up of Aileen?

Charlize: Everything in Aileen's life was life and death. It's something very hard, I think, for us to understand. The more I dived into her lifestyle and the life that she was leading, the more I realized that she lived like that every day. Even her friend Dawn, who went to school with her in Michigan, and who she wrote to for 12 years, while she was on death row, said that, when the cops came to notify her that Aileen was arrested, she thought that they were tell her that Aileen was dead, and she was shocked that Aileen had actually even survived for as long as she did. I can't imagine a woman sleeping under an underpass, or living in the woods, at the age of 14, in the freezing cold snow in Michigan, getting frostbitten feet. She had no sensation left in her feet. I also can't imagine getting into a car with a stranger, traveling out of state with them and giving them sexual favors. When she's making these decisions in her everyday life, they're life and death decisions. She might not get out of that car. She might not wake up alive. She doesn't know when her next meal is going to come around. There's a way she carries herself. She's 5'3" and you think she's 6 feet. She's like a blowfish, blowing herself up to survive.

TeenHollywood: Aileen did have a swagger. How did you manage to perfect the body language?

Charlize: I studied ballet for 12 years of my life. The reason why I fell into acting was because, when I really analyzed why I loved ballet so much, it wasn't necessarily the training or the dance, but the fact that I got on stage and told stories. I was telling stories with my body for most of my life, before I started acting. So, I've always been very much aware of how important the body is, as an instrument, to tell a story. Sometimes, an act with the hand is so much more powerful than an actual word. In Aileen's case, there was a way that she carried herself. I had to just do these things non-stop, mimic them, watch and observe, so that when we started shooting, I would walk through my day in that swagger, in those clothes, trying to get used to that body. I think you try to do as much of that work as you can, before you start shooting, like a dancer. You're in the studio, working your instrument, and that night that you do a 3-hour performance. You're not counting the beats and thinking of the steps, the body just does it.

TeenHollywood: How difficult was it then to let all of that go and be you again?

Charlize: The thing that was incredibly helpful was the fact that I had to go straight into another movie. When that happened, I kind of went, "This is so bad." But, I think, in many ways, it was my saving grace. I had no choice. I had to discipline myself to lose the weight and I had to discipline myself to focus on this new thing that I was doing [Head in the Clouds]. I think it was the healthiest way for me to get rid of everything that I had taken in on Monster.

TeenHollywood: Was it helpful to be able to read the real letters that Aileen wrote from prison?

Charlize: Definitely. For me, I walked into this going, "Okay, so here's my questions. It's a real life character and I'm going to go read all these letters that she wrote on death row, and all of these questions are going to get answered." And, it doesn't really work that way. You're dealing with a human being. It's not a computer where you type in the question and the answer is given to you. This was somebody who was reflecting on a lot of stuff. I think the things that connected me, on an emotional level, were not things like her talking, in a very detached fashion, about how many times she was raped in her life, but sometimes was as simple as, "Yeah, I read this book and they say that I swear, and I don't swear." And, you relate to it. She said, "I don't do that," and her friend said, "Yeah, you do kind of do that." There were human conditions, like that, about her that absolutely just crawled under my skin. How she saw herself was extremely interesting to me.

TeenHollywood: Was she a victim or did she deserve to die?

Charlize: I don't think anybody deserves to die. I've never been a believer in capital punishment and I don't think it's ever proven to be very effective. I think, when you look at the numbers, it's quite frightening what it has done. In states where they use capital punishment, the crime rates and murder rates are skyrocketing. And, in states where they don't have it, the numbers are really, really low. So, I don't believe in that.

TeenHollywood: You were about to meet her, but didn't get the chance. How do you feel about that?

Charlize: I feel like everything in life turns out the way it does, and you deal and cope with that. I don't know if it would have been the best thing for us to meet. Who knows? I don't know what would have happened. We talked about it once, and then we were all shocked to find out that she was executed. That was definitely in the pipeline to happen, and then, when it didn't, another great thing came to me -- the letters. I think, in a way, that was almost better than sitting in front of her. I don't know how comfortable she would have been with a complete stranger, who was about to play her. I don't know how much she would have given me. But, reading her letters was like reading somebody's diary. It was much more personal.

TeenHollywood: Did you read anything else about her, aside from the letters?

Charlize: There were a couple of books written, that I read all of. I felt that it was very one-sided. Everybody was trying to analyze her. They'd say things like, "She was killing people who were representing her father." It became so melodramatic that I read them all and just went, "This is why I want to tell this story, because these are all of the things that I want to veer away from, in a way." I just always felt that there was something about her and her life that nobody really, truly got. Her human condition. She was just a human being. That was the one thing that I always felt people missed.

TeenHollywood: Had she not been executed, would you still have been able to do the film?

Charlize: We didn't know she was going to be executed. She'd had so many appeals, through the 12 years that she was on death row, that nobody thought it was going to go through. When we saw the documentary that Nick Broomfield did, we realized how much she was sabotaging the appeal. The film was greenlit. The Son of Sam gives you the right to tell those stories. We didn't, necessarily, have to get her approval, but I don't think you want to make a movie like that [without it].

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.