The movie that nearly sent Charlize Theron into Hollywood exile: “She was very lucky she did not get the part”
Every actor has to start somewhere, and for Charlize Theron, it was in the same place as many other future superstars: a terrible horror movie.
It’s become something of a rite of passage for those destined to reach the pinnacle of Hollywood to start off their careers in a shitty genre flick, which didn’t do anything to prevent the likes of Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, or Hilary Swank from realising their potential, with all of them becoming Academy Award winners.
Theron ended up in the exact same boat less than a decade after she went uncredited and was dubbed over in her feature debut, 1995’s Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. At around the same time, she auditioned and made the final shortlist for another production, and it’s not even hyperbolic to say she wouldn’t have won an Oscar for ‘Best Actress’ eight years after her first film had she played it.
Between her inauspicious cinematic beginnings and Patty Jenkins’ Monster, Theron was pegged as one of the industry’s fastest-rising stars through her work in 2 Days in the Valley, The Devil’s Advocate, and The Cider House Rules, and she continued going from strength to strength after being recognised by the Academy.
However, none of that would have happened had she been cast as the lead in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, based entirely on the unfortunate fate that befell Elizabeth Berkley. The Saved by the Bell alum was awarded two Razzies for ‘Worst Actress’ and ‘Worst New Star’, and she never recovered from the ignominy of headlining a movie that was an unmitigated critical and commercial disaster.
Even though Berkley was a virtual nonentity on the big screen before Showgirls, her small screen history made her a bigger star than Theron by default. Verhoeven recalled the latter lobbying hard in her audition to try and get the Showgirls gig, and the director thinks she should be grateful that she didn’t get it.
“She was good and wanted the part, but basically, she was not well-known enough at the time and just did not fit the part, so we said no,” he told the New York Daily News. “I have full respect for Charlize, but if she had been offered the part then she would probably have been chewed up in the same way they treated Elizabeth. She was very lucky that she did not get the part.”
To illustrate that point, in the same year Theron embodied Aileen Wuornos in Monster and took second billing behind Edward Norton in the lucrative remake of The Italian Job, Berkley appeared in two made-for-TV movies, an episode of CSI and the Canadian dramedy Moving Malcolm.
It was understandable for Theron to have her eyes on Showgirls when Verhoeven was one of Hollywood’s biggest directors at the time, but she definitely dodged a bullet – and saved her career – by missing out.
