Charlize Theron reflected on being a female action star during a Friday Comic-Con @ Home panel.
As part of her extraordinary rank, Charlize Theron has established herself as one of today’s top rough woman action stars. But almost 15 years before beating a post-apocalyptic cult army in “Mad Max: Fury Road”, she was forced to demonstrate that women can keep up with the boys to the filmmakers behind “The Italian Job”, he said during a Comic-Con @ Home panel Friday.
Before the 2003 film was in production, “I realized that there were still a lot of misconceptions about women and gender. Although in that movie the action is really based on the cars, we had to physically do a lot of those things, ”he said. “There was real pressure to achieve those stunts with the actors … there was a very unfair process that went with that. I was the only woman with a bunch of guys and I remember vividly receiving the schedule in our pre-production, and I had been scheduled for six more weeks of hard training than any of the guys. It was so insulting. “
Based on the 1969 British film of the same name, “The Italian Job” starred in Theron alongside Mark Wahlberg, Edward Norton, Jason Statham, and Donald Sutherland as a gang of thieves whose mission to steal gold takes them on walks through Venice and Los Angeles in Mini Coopers kart type.
Theron said the difference in the way she was treated compared to her male characters “put a real fire under my butt.”
“I thought, ‘Okay, you guys want to play this game, let’s go,'” he said. “I set out to beat all those guys. I vividly remember Mark Wahlberg, halfway through one of our training sessions, stopping and vomiting because I was nauseous from doing 360s. “
Along with her dramatic roles as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in her Oscar-winning “Monster,” highlights of Theron’s career including intense action roles such as in “Æon Flux,” “Fury Road,” Netflix’s “Atomic Blonde” and most recently “The Old Guard” released earlier this year.
She said she approached her first action roles differently compared to “The Old Guard.”
“When I started my action career, it was very important to sell the authenticity of ‘Yes, I can fight and I can defeat this guy and I can survive this,'” he said. “There was such a level of wanting to demonstrate that to audiences that for years they said, ‘No, a woman could never fight a boy of that size.'”
With the new Netflix movie, Theron said he worked hard with fight coordinator Danny Hernández to develop real-life martial arts skills.
“Trying to convey that story, to be very specific, we had four months and we had to really fine-tune the things that we could really excel at. Those first few weeks when you walk into the gym, you’re really trying to evaluate trying to see where you can excel and what you shouldn’t even waste time on, ”she said.
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