The “insulting” 2003 movie that underestimated Charlize Theron: “Put a real fire under my ass”
As a 30-year veteran of the business, an Academy Award winner, and one of her generation’s foremost action heroes, it’s been a very long time since anyone has underestimated Charlize Theron.
That hasn’t always been the case, though, so when one movie made a preemptive decision and decided without informing the actor that she probably wouldn’t be as skilled as her male colleagues in one important area of pre-production, she took it personally and made it her mission to prove a point.
Theron, no stranger to suffering for her art after almost being left paralysed by the worst movie of her career, which underlines her commitment to the job, wouldn’t normally bat an eyelid at being put through her paces as part of an intense training regime designed to make her appear as convincing onscreen as possible.
Unlike the original’s star, Michael Caine, who didn’t even have a driving licence when she shot the film, Theron was more than qualified behind the wheel when she signed up to star in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job. Naturally, being at least serviceable as a stunt driver was a necessity for the myriad of four-wheeled action scenes, but right from the start, the whiff of sexism was in the air.
“The Italian Job was a great experience, in the sense that I realised there was still so much misconception around women in the genre,” the Oscar winner explained. “There was a very unfair process that went with that. I was the only woman with a bunch of guys, and I remember vividly getting the schedule in our pre-production, and they had scheduled me for six weeks more hard training than any of the guys.”
As you’d expect, Theron wasn’t best pleased with the unspoken assumption that she’d need 42 days more practice behind the wheel than the fellas. “It was just so insulting,” she added. “But it was also a thing that put a real fire under my ass.” To that end, the star “made it a point to out-drive all those guys,” which she did, with Mark Wahlberg making an arse of himself, to boot.
Theron recalled that midway through one of those training sessions, the leading man was “pulling over and throwing up because he was so nauseous from doing 360s.” Meanwhile, she was having a ball, making a mockery of the belief that, for whatever reason, even if you can probably guess what that reason was, she’d need an extra six weeks to match Wahlberg, Jason Statham, and the rest.
With the fire under her arse well and truly lit, Theron wrapped The Italian Job V2.0 in the summer of 2002, moved straight onto Patty Jenkins’ Monster, won herself an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’, and did what so many other freshly-minted victors have done before and played her first leading role in an action flick.
Admittedly, Æon Flux was shite, but she’d been bitten by the ass-kicking bug nonetheless, which led her to Mad Max: Fury Road, The Old Guard, the Fast & Furious franchise, Atomic Blonde, Apex, and all the rest of her action hero gigs, and that fire is clearly still burning today.
