So, Charlize, you’re obviously no stranger to roles that require a tremendous amount of physicality. That’s been a big part of your skillset as an actor for a long time. Was there a moment in your career where you made a conscious decision to start actively seeking out parts that presented you with the opportunity to showcase those skills?
Charlize Theron: Yes. I had done an action movie earlier than this, but I didn’t really get … I didn’t find an affinity. I didn’t think like, “Oh, I would want to” … It was actually a very traumatic experience. So I didn’t make an action movie for a long time until I got offered “Mad Max: Fury Road.” And I think that movie really kind of reminded me how much I like physical storytelling.
And so I made a real — well, not myself, but our production company made a real concerted effort to find material that we could develop around that. And that’s how “Atomic Blonde” came about, and the two “Old Guard” films, and then this. I think we ended up wanting to test the waters, see what we could do that felt like pushing the envelope and trying to reach for things in the genre that we like, that we don’t see a lot of.
And physically, for me, it became … I was like, “If I’m going to do this, let’s do it. Let’s really do it.” And it’s been that kind of journey for the last 10 years.
Well, watching “Apex,” I can tell that even if the production might have been filming on a soundstage in some scenes, you really cannot fake the physicality that both of you are showcasing in this movie. I know they can do amazing things with face replacement and stuff like that these days, but it really looked like you were out there in a kayak for a bunch of shots and you’re still climbing on some kind of rock wall, even if some of the backgrounds might have been enhanced with visual effects later.
Charlize Theron: Yeah. We only shot on a stage for three weeks. The rest of the film was all on practical location. So the majority of that film is really happening in the gorges that you see and everything about it is real. Sure, we’ve enhanced a little bit of an extra river for you to see in the back, but aside from those things, everything is really practical. Even the stunt that I have on the top of the mountain, that was an actual gorge that was way past 60 feet that we decided to hang me off and have me free climb up there, which I still don’t understand how that happened.
But it was the kind of film that we set out to make. So, Baltasar Kormákur, our director, really likes that kind of practical aspect too, but I’m very proud to say that when you watch the film, we don’t have face replacement except for a few water shots. I have some help on the kayaking stuff, not a lot of rapids in Australia. So they went and shot some second unit in New Zealand with two gold –
Taron Egerton: World class. Yeah.
Charlize Theron: Yeah. Like, stuff that I was never going to learn in three months. But the climbing is all me. I did 100 percent of all the climbing and the bouldering in the middle of the film.
