The one movie Charlize Theron knew was doomed from the start: “It was going to be a fucking flop”
Every actor goes into their latest project expecting big things, but sometimes they’ll figure out pretty quickly that nothing lies in their future but disaster. Charlize Theron twigged early on that she was in the midst of cinematic disaster, which she did at least use as a way to turn a negative into a positive.
The ‘Oscars curse’ is a very real thing, and anyone who disagrees clearly hasn’t been paying attention. Too many freshly minted Academy Award winners have immediately stumbled into terrible films to make it a coincidence, and Theron wasn’t immune from the misfortune that plagued so many of her peers.
After winning a well-deserved ‘Best Actress’ prize for her transformative turn in Patty Jenkins’ Monster, she made one of the biggest mistakes of her career. Theron took to the podium in February 2004 to bask in the adulation of her peers and a watching audience of millions, and six months later, she was on the set of Karyn Kusama’s Æon Flux.
The bad omens were there from the start after Theron narrowly avoided death during a stunt sequence that almost went perilously awry, and by the time production had finished, she was under absolutely no illusions that the sci-fi action thriller was doomed to fail. Obviously, she was completely correct, with the movie a box office bomb and critical dud that instantly became the worst-reviewed film of her life.
Still, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was comedy. The same year Æon Flux was released, Theron made her debut on Arrested Development as Rita Leeds, and venturing into the uncharted territory of trying to make audiences laugh helped soften the blow of headlining such an atrocious flick.
“I just fucking loved that show,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “And this is going to sound so ‘poor me’, but I do feel like sometimes, as women, we get one shot. And I knew that Æon Flux was going to be a fucking flop. I knew it from the beginning; that’s why I did Arrested Development.”
Some stars may have pouted about their latest project being dragged around the back and getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of it by critics and audiences who’d wasted their time and effort on dedicating 92 minutes of their lives they’d never get back to a truly wretched genre film, but not Theron.
Instead, she decided to make a pre-emptive strike on the inevitable backlash that would greet Æon Flux by diving headfirst into comedy, a genre she’d never really tackled before. It worked wonders, with her Arrested Development stint winning plenty of praise, while it would take one hell of a search to find anyone on the planet who could even tell you one thing that happened in Æon Flux.
