“When meaty roles come through, I've been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
he record, being beautiful doesn’t always work to your advantage in Hollywood. Take Charlize Theron, the genetically perfect human specimen who has purposefully handicapped her looks by gaining weight, shaving her head, wearing unflattering sweatpants, and going to whatever other means necessary for casting agents and even Academy members to take her seriously. Even after winning the Oscar for Monster—effectively proving that she could play average-looking—Theron still says that her looks have gotten in the way of some of Hollywood’s best parts.
“Jobs with real gravitas go to people that are physically right for them and that’s the end of the story,” Theron tells British GQ in a new interview. “How many roles are out there for the gorgeous, f***ing, gown-wearing eight-foot model? When meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
Even when she did play a normal-looking person in Monster, so much attention was paid to her physical transformation that the actress pointed out that people might be missing out on the performance. “The greatest thing I can hope for, which is an impossible thing to hope for because so much emphasis has been put on the transformation, but it’s that people can go see it and get past all that,” Theron said at the time.
Even directors have a hard time coming to grips with Theron’s looks—with Woody Allenfamously saying of the actress, who played a supermodel in his movie Celebrity, she’s “so hot that if she was in this room your buttons would melt.”
It was a female director, Patty Jenkins, who cast Theron in Monster and took a “shot” on the pretty actress.
“The truth is, I just thought she was great,” Jenkins has said of looking past Theron’s looks. “I thought she was always better than everything she did, and always made her characters completely real. Yeah, she’s beautiful. Who cares if she looks like [serial killer] Aileen Wuornos or not? The point was, she has heart, and she’s really brave, and she’s really strong. I knew if I could get those things focused on this role, she would give it the humanity and the dedication necessary to pull it off.”
During Theron’s interview with GQ, the Oscar winner also speaks about the gender disparity in (and outside) Hollywood, saying, “We live in a society where women wilt and men age like fine wine. And, for a long time, women accepted it. We were waiting for society to change, but now we’re taking leadership. It would be a lie to say there is less worry for women as they get older than there is for men. . . . It feels there’s this unrealistic standard of what a woman is supposed to look like when she’s over 40.”
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