Charlize: Gaining 3st for role gave me depression
‘I would wake up and just eat’
A LOT of actors will tell you they suffer for their art. In Charlize Theron’s case, she brought on depression by deliberately gaining three-and-a-half stone.
In her latest film, Tully, she plays an overweight and overwhelmed mother of two called Marlo who is struggling while pregnant with another child.
The 42-year-old, who is usually a trim size 8, told how she gorged on fast food – including burgers and milkshake for breakfast and macaroni and cheese at 2am – to get ready for the part.
She said: ‘I wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think that was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset. It was a huge surprise to me. I got hit in the face pretty hard with depression. For the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. I was not that fun to be around on this film.’
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, Miss Theron, who also gained weight to play a serial killer in the 2003 film Monster – and won an Oscar for that role – added: ‘The first three weeks are always fun because you’re just like a kid in a candy store. So it was fun to go and have breakfast at In-N-Out [burger chain] and have two milkshakes.
‘And then after three weeks, it’s not fun any more. Like, all of a sudden you’re just done eating that amount and then it becomes a job.’ Miss Theron explained that for Tully, she would have food by her bed, including macaroni and cheese, and would set her alarm for the middle of the night to have another meal ‘just to maintain the weight’. ‘I would wake up and I would just eat it,’ she said.
The star, who has two children – Jackson, six, and August, two – said it took a year and a half to shed the weight and described the dieting process as ‘hell’.
‘I was worried. I was like, this is taking a really long time. Because on Monster, I just didn’t snack for five days [to lose the weight afterwards] and I was fine. You know your body at 27 is a little different than your body at 43.’