Did Charlize Theron escape career suicide before it began?
What can we consider career suicide? For some actors, they simply don’t come back from a role that essentially destroyed their chances of success, while others have the power to eventually pull themselves back up.
There is so much gambling that goes into accepting a role, because you truly don’t know if a movie is going to be a success, even if it’s got all the makings of a future classic. You really have to hope for the best in most cases, like when Gene Hackman arrived on the set of Superman and was convinced he’d made the worst decision possible.
“I walked on the set in London on the first day of filming, and there was Chris[topher] Reeve in this skintight blue suit and red cape. I looked at him and thought I had really done the ultimate act and committed suicide,” he once told The New York Times. Luckily, it was a success, and his career was fine, but not everyone can say the same.
The release of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls in 1995 is a prime example of a leading actor’s career crashing and burning in an instant, and that was a fate almost afforded to Charlize Theron instead of Elizabeth Berkley. One of Theron’s first auditions after her 1990s entry into Hollywood was for the now-infamous erotic film, which saw Berkley play a young woman in pursuit of her dreams of becoming a showgirl in Las Vegas, trying to shimmy away from corrupt corners where nothing is off the table, no matter how ridiculous.
Showgirls occupies an interesting place in cinema history, equally hated as it is adored. Upon its release, the film was slated as one of the worst ever made, which is quite the feat, while a more critical lens saw others consider the slander a little reductive, believing the movie to be misunderstood and a pure slice of camp served with a hefty dose of swimming pool sex and nudity.
Regardless of your opinion on Showgirls, the film certainly destroyed the career of Elizabeth Berkley, who dedicated herself to the daring part. Sadly, she won a Razzie for her performance, and her career immediately died a rather tragic death. Coming from a starring role on Saved By the Bell a few years before, Showgirls was her first leading role in a feature film, and the polarising reception relegated her to a very underwhelming career with few notable movie credits to show for it.
So, it seems like Theron had a lucky escape. Talking to MTV News, the actor once explained, “It was the second audition I ever went to. From what I hear, they really liked me. I think the talks fell through with the actress that ended up doing it, and so they reopened it up and started casting it again, and that’s when I came in. And then they somehow sorted out that deal. But at some point, Paul was interested in me doing it.”
Theron eventually broke into Hollywood with her role as the killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, taking on a drastic physical performance that would unsurprisingly win her an Oscar. Would her career have taken a different direction if she’d got the part in the raunchy cult classic instead? It’s hard to imagine her in the X-rated drama, and with Hollywood being a ruthless game of chance, you have to risk playing if you want to succeed, and Berkley sadly picked the wrong table read.
