Talking about Theron and her acting gifts, director Duigan enthuses, "Charlize is a virtuoso. She is an actress who has both great application and stamina, as well as great instincts. She could sustain the most difficult emotion take after take, and be at once strong, strident and maddening. Gilda’s approach to life is to be vivid and spontaneous, but she has this nagging feeling that her freedom is illusory, and Charlize captures that brilliantly."
In this interview, the Academy Award-winning actress discusses working with boyfriend Stuart Townsend, playing bisexual characters, and her admiration for "Head in the Clouds" co-star, Penelope Cruz.
INTERVIEW WITH CHARLIZE THERON ('Gilda'):
Is it easier to create a relationship onscreen when you’re involved with your co-star?
The thing that I thought…It’s tricky to explain, but the reason why I thought Stuart and I could actually bring something with our relationship to this material was because it’s not just a relationship about love. It’s really about the opposite, this deconstructing. I mean, she’s the manipulator and in many ways, she’s the one that basically breaks that down every single time. But I found myself constantly being an eye line for him and having to get him to a place where [he was able] to have his heart be completely ripped out of his chest. Being his girlfriend, I had that power and I had to kind of abuse it a little bit in this movie (laughing). So, in that way, it was really great. If this was a film just about the greatness of love, I think it would’ve been a lot harder. But it was so the opposite that I thought that that was a positive thing for us.
Why would it have been harder if it was about the greatness of love?
Well, because I think that there is a comfort level that you have in a relationship that I think is sometimes hard for people to get around. When they watch a movie and they know that you’re in a relationship, you just kind of watch that constantly. There’s a fear of it becoming the people that you know as celebrities on screen. But I think that it distracts from that when it’s something more than just that, which I think this film is. At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.
How do you feel about the handling of bisexuality in films, having played two in a row?
The thing that’s interesting about both those characters, and I think is quite the norm and people might not agree with me, but I think that in general, it’s really just about the search for love. And those two characters in particular. I think Gilda and Aileen have that in common where, for different reasons, I mean, Aileen was an outcast and was just willing to accept love from anybody. So her preference was not whether it was a man or a woman. It was just a human being that would accept her the way she was and not judge her for the things that she did. With Gilda, it was somewhat similar only the difference is that with Gilda, she knew she had a very short life and wanted to experience everything, all the different kinds of love that you can experience in one lifetime. She wanted to manipulate, to experience in a very short period of time. And I guess that’s the great lesson that she learns at the end of this film, that you cannot manipulate life that way. Some things you can’t make happen. And especially not when you live it the way she does which is, “I can only go this far, because I can’t go beyond that because I know I don’t want to hurt myself and I don’t want to hurt somebody else.” But a little bit more selfishly, she doesn’t want to hurt herself. So the physical aspect becomes kind of her quick fix.
The friendship that she has with Mia is that of finding a woman in her life that can represent a great friend, somebody that she can teach, which I thought was very important to her. And then, at the same time, also be open to the idea of actually having that go further to a more physical level. But with both relationships, she can’t have any of that. Whether it’s by being bisexual or being heterosexual, she can’t have any of it because she’s exploring so many different things, wanting to experience so many different things, that she never really focuses on what her heart says. And kind of just letting that play out in her life.
