Charlize Theron is opening up about her volatile past.
The 50-year-old actress got candid in an interview with the New York Times about her mother Gerda and father Charles, and growing up in South Africa.
Keep reading to find out more…
During the conversation, she spoke about her father building a bar inside their home, and becoming “a full-blown functioning drunk,” explaining he would go missing and come back “in a state that was pretty severe.”
“It would get messy and loud, and my mom’s not a wallflower either. She wasn’t just sitting and taking it. She made it known that she wasn’t happy about his lifestyle. So it really caused a lot of verbal abuse. Personally, for me, the worst thing was they would ice each other. There would be a big fight, and then they wouldn’t talk for three weeks. I didn’t have siblings, and that house just went silent,” she recalled.
When asked about whether he was violent toward her, Charlize said he was “scary” and did frightening things, but that he didn’t hit her.
“He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk. There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal.”
Later on, she reflected on her mom considering divorce when she was 12 or 13, and how foreign that concept was in their culture.
“So when she said, ‘I think the best thing for us is for me to separate from him,’ it was scary because I didn’t know what that would look like,” she recalled. “I was almost talking her back into staying, because the alternative felt so foreign to me. But I think she knew and she was trying to figure out ways to get me out of the house. She sent me to a boarding school specifically because she wanted me to get out of the house. She was very aware of what it was doing to me.”
Then, she recalled the shocking story of her mother fatally wounding her father when she was 15 in 1991.
“My mom and I had gone to see a movie, and my dad had taken the key to the front steel door. Every room in our house had a steel door. So if you got into the front door, the kitchen had a steel door that you had to unlock, because that’s the kind of violence that we were living in,” she began.
“Our country was on the brink of civil war. So my mom couldn’t get into the first lock. We always knew where my dad was. His brother lived a couple of streets away, and if he wasn’t home, he was there drinking. Nothing out of the usual. We went over, they were pretty loaded, and I had to pee really badly. So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody. Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?’”
She said that after they left, when they got home, she sat with her mom and agreed that she should separate from her father.
“I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, ‘When he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I’m asleep.’ I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration or unhappiness by the way he drove in. The way that he drove into that property that night, I can’t explain it to you. I just knew something bad was going to happen,” Charlize said.
“To get to the point: He finally broke into the house. He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us. His brother was with him as well. We knew it was serious, and so by the time he broke into the first gate, my mom ran to the safe to get her gun. She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it. And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us,” Charlize recalled.
“It’s insane when you think about it that way. But the messaging was very clear. I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun. Encouragement from the brother. He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there. The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”
She added: “Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story. These things are prevalent in a lot of homes. Women really get a very, very unfair shake, even in this country. Nobody takes it seriously, the situation that they’re in. And I don’t think anybody took my mom seriously…when you’re dealing with a charming drunk, who was always looking for buddies to come join the party, and a culture that just accepted it — that was part of being South African. Men drink. I remember my little nephew, when people asked, ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’ saying, ‘I’m going to drink.’ That’s when you become a man.”
Charlize added: “I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone. I never knew about a story like that. When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”
For more from Charlize, head to nytimes.com.
