Charlize Theron shares harrowing details of her mother killing her father: “He was going to kill us”
Charlize Theron has opened up about her mother fatally shooting her father when she was 15 years old, stating that she is “not haunted” anymore by the traumatic memory.
In an emotional interview with The New York Times, she looked back at the incident candidly and admitted that she was happy to divulge details as it “makes other people not feel alone”.
She explained the urge to recount the details so publicly, “I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”
Theron recalled how it began, when she and her mother stopped at her uncle’s house after attending the cinema; there, she accidentally offended her drunken father as she didn’t greet him on her arrival.
She recalled, “I had to pee really badly. So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody. Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiralled. Like: ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?'”
Even as a child, Theron could sense that her father was “mad” at her, and asked her mother to tell her father that she was sleeping upon his return to avoid his terror.
She continued, “I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration, or unhappiness by the way he drove in. The way that he drove into that property that night, I can’t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen.”
The Atomic Blonde actor explained that her father soon “broke into the house” alongside his brother, using firearms to bypass the security measures.
“He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us,” Theron recalled, shockingly.
She went on, “We knew it was serious, and so by the time he broke into the first gate, my mom ran to the safe to get her gun. She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it.”
Her father fired multiple shots at her and her mother while they were cowering in the room.
“He just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us,” she said.
“The messaging was very clear: ‘I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun’,” Theron recalled of his harrowing promise.
With no choice left but to defend her daughter, her mother then shot both her uncle and her father.
Theron shared, “He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”
Though the night in 1991 left them both traumatised, Theron was sent to school the next day. Her mother tried to protect her from the memory by repeating, “We’ve got to move on”.
Theron often shares the story in an attempt to highlight the horror of domestic violence and to celebrate her mother, whom she has previously deemed a “warrior”.
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