Motherhood helped Charlize Theron prepare for Tully
For Charlize Theron, acting means going beyond the script. She also doesn’t shy away from subverting traditional notions of beauty to get into character — her performances in Monster (2003), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Atomic Blonde (2017) attest to that fact.
So, she surely wasn’t climbing into a fat suit to play an end-of-her-tether motherof-three in Tully, her second collaboration with director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, after Young Adult (2011). She gained 50 pounds for the role, and sought out her own experience with her adopted children — a son, Jackson, 6, and a daughter, August, 2. Here are excerpts from an interview. Did Diablo Cody write this role with you in mind?
I don’t think Diablo writes like that. I think the writing for her is very therapeutic, and she had just had her third child, and she sat down at a desk to write about what she was feeling because it was so overwhelming, and the script kind of poured out of her.
How young were your own children when you first read it? My second kid was around six or seven months old [when
I got the script for Tully], so I was just coming out of that tunnel place where you’re kind of feeling overwhelmed, and I had just seen a sliver of light.
Was the physical transformation necessary?
I don’t know how to play a woman who’s giving birth to her third child and then having to live in the aftermath of that body without doing it. Jason knows me and how I work and my process, and we both knew it had to happen. For me, it’s a way to get closer to the character and to try to feel as much as I possibly can. And that helped you tap into Marlo’s emotional state?
Well, I thought I was just going to start with the physical transformation, and then I would get to her inner workings. And what ended up happening was very much like this character, and, I think, a lot of women. It really affects your mood and your brain when you’re eating that much processed food and sugar, and for the first time in my life I went into a really, really deep depression.
THE NEW YORK TIMES