A lot has been said about Charlize Theron’s beauty, but time and time again, this actress has proven she’s more than just a pretty face. An Academy Award winner, Theron has had a prolific and multifaceted career in Hollywood, playing everything from the badass, buzz-cut antiheroine in Mad Max: Fury Road to a vengeful evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman to real-life murderess Aileen Wuornos in Monster. This weekend, Theron is starring in her latest, Atomic Blonde, in which she plays a undercover spy. Tied to the release of the upcoming action film, we reveal some of the most surprising facts about the South African former model’s fascinating life. Below, five things you might not know about Charlize Theron:
English is her second language.Born in Benoni, South Africa, Theron’s first language was Afrikaans, a South African dialect that is borrowed from Dutch. She once revealed her English was “actually very bad” until she came stateside as a teenager to model. “The reason I have an American accent is because, in fact, I learned to speak English properly in the U.S.,” she’s said. After decades living and working in the United States, Theron eventually became a naturalized American citizen in 2008. “I’ve always wanted to be [a citizen], they just didn’t want to take me,” she told David Letterman during an interview on theLate Show. “It’s quite a process, you have to work hard, you know, study up.”
You’ve been saying her name wrong this entire time.While most people pronounce her name as “Theh-ron,” the correct way of saying her South African last name is to pronounce it like the word “thrown.” Watch her clear up the matter in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, below.
She was discovered by a talent scout while she was yelling at a bank teller.Theron moved to Hollywood when she was 18 years old with $400 and one tattered suitcase. She survived on a series of catalog modeling jobs until her discovery by a talent agent—at a bank. “I was trying to cash my last check from a modeling job in New York, but because it was an out-of-state check, the bank wouldn’t accept it—and I really needed the money. So I began pleading with this teller to help me,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I was begging and pleading, and a gentleman came over and tried to help . . . What I didn’t know is that I was auditioning for a guy who would end up being my manager. On the way out, the man who’d helped gave me his card. [He was John Crosby, who represented John Hurt and Rene Russo.] He said, ‘If you’re interested, I’ll represent you.’ ”
She was almost cast in Showgirls.During a 2015 interview, Showgirls director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall) revealed that Theron came close to starring in his universally panned 1995 stripper movie. “Charlize also auditioned, and I don’t recall her having any problem with nudity at all,” he said. “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.” Theron now acknowledges that she dodged a bullet and explains her decision to audition for the role mainly had to do with working with Verhoeven. “You have to understand, at the time Paul Verhoeven had just discovered Sharon Stone and he was the director,” she said to Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens: Live “You kind of go with the filmmaker.”
One of her first crushes was Tom Hanks.Theron once admitted she was infatuated with Tom Hanks as a young girl. “I grew up watching the movies of Tom Hanks. He was like a ‘boyfriend.’ When I was 8, I would walk around like I was one of the girls in a Tom Hanks movie,” she said. The two later worked together on Hanks’s directorial debut, That Thing You Do! When they’d finished shooting, Theron asked Hanks to sign the movie’s script for her. He obliged, and gave her a piece of advice: “He ended it with, ‘Promise me you’ll never do television.’ And I bet he’s eating his words,” she recently said.