“We just met a movie star”: the 1996 role Charlize Theron was “too much of a supernova” to play
The way Hollywood discovered Charlize Theron is one of those stories that sounds ripped right out of a movie, and looking at it through a modern lens, it’s something unlikely to happen again.
Having left her native South Africa at 16 to pursue a modelling career, Theron and her mother then moved to the United States, where she trained as a ballet dancer for a year before an injury ended that dream, so she headed to Los Angeles on a one-way ticket with dreams of making it in cinema.
Ambitious, sure, but after furiously arguing with a bank teller for trying to cash an out-of-state cheque as a non-American citizen, a talent agent ended up cashing it on her behalf and handing her a business card. With the benefit of hindsight, it sounds a little creepy, but you can’t say she hasn’t done well out of it.
Admittedly, Theron was given an inauspicious introduction to acting after making her feature-length bow in the bargain-basement horror sequel Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, and to add insult to injury, her voice was overdubbed in post-production, but it didn’t take her long to make an impact.
Eight years after her first film, Theron was an Academy Award-winning actor who’d shared a cast with Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Paxton, Johnny Depp, Michael Caine, Ben Affleck, Ellen Burstyn, Robert De Niro, Will Smith, and Matt Damon, so her rise was meteoric.
One of her earliest roles was also the most ironic, with the star admitting that she’d grown up with a crush on Tom Hanks, who ended up casting her in his directorial debut, That Thing You Do! It was only her third film, but the first-time filmmaker knew that she was destined for the top, which still wasn’t enough to convince him that he should cast her in the part she actually wanted to play.
In the Beatles-inspired dramedy, Theron played Tina Powers, the girlfriend of Tom Everett Scott’s drummer, Guy Patterson. However, she originally had eyes on Faye Dolan, the second lead and partner of Johnathon Schaech’s lead vocalist and guitarist, James Mattingly II, which ultimately went to Liv Tyler.
“Charlize read on the very first day that I read actors,” Hanks recalled. “She said, ‘Listen, I know I can play Tina, but I want to play Faye’. I said, ‘I get that’, but what I was thinking in my head was, ‘You’re too much of a supernova to play Faye’. Casting her was such a coup.” It might have been a coup, but not enough to stop him from cutting some of her scenes.
Producer Edward Saxon remembers Hanks walking into a meeting after her audition and announcing to the room, “Gentlemen, we just met a movie star,” and he was right. She may not have gotten the part she really wanted, but That Thing You Do! was a pivotal stepping stone in Theron’s career nonetheless.
