Ms. Theron is, of course, a powerhouse actress who has old Hollywood glamour and a mile-wide range. She has also played a series of lethal ladies so convincingly it is hard not to conclude a part of her is tapped into a rich vein of redirected rage. Obviously, being an Oscar winner, she’s ace at her job. But her slam-dunk portrayals of real and fictitious killers — the convicted murderer Aileen Wuornos from “Monster,” Imperator Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Ravenna in “Snow White and the Huntsman” and now a merciless hand-to-hand combatant in the new “Atomic Blonde” — all suggest a woman who does not easily suffer fools.
Ms. Theron does, however, suffer colds, and had to cancel a few hours before our lunch and reschedule for the next day. She was fighting a virus, she later explained, and shortly before our planned chat had downed daytime cough medicine that left her a little high, and not all that cogent.
“So sorry,” Ms. Theron said as she scooched into a corner banquet table at a restaurant on the Universal lot. She is luminous, lanky and, by all evidence, poreless. (Defying celebrity profile protocol, I neglected to jot down either what she had on — I dimly recall black pants and a black top — or what she ordered for lunch.) She still sounded somewhat froggy, and her eyes were a little rheumy, but she had rallied. As the extended fight sequences in “Atomic Blonde” show, Ms. Theron’s work ethic is, in a good way, sick.Continue reading the main story
“I did two movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his stunt double,” said David Leitch, a former stunt coordinator and a director of “John Wick,” who directed “Atomic Blonde.” “She’s trained as hard as he’s ever trained. Not to disparage Jean-Claude, who’s great. But she didn’t have a martial arts background, and went in at ground zero. She had the will to want to be great right off the bat.”
Beyond positioning Ms. Theron solidly as a compelling female action hero, “Atomic Blonde” feels like the logical next step for an actress who stunned in 2015 as the one-armed warrior Furiosa, effectively stealing “Mad Max: Fury Road” from the film’s ostensible star, Tom Hardy. After shining throughout her chameleon-like career, be it playing the romantic interest, the dramatic lead, the darkly comedic antiheroine, or, of course, a serial killer, Ms. Theron is, at 41, deploying a brand of female empowerment and ferocity that audiences crave now more than ever. Like Furiosa, and also Cipher in the most recent “Fast and Furious” film, Ms. Theron’s “Atomic Blonde” character is unapologetic and cunning, wholly owning her space, rather than merely populating or decorating a world defined by men.
In “Atomic Blonde,” a top MI6 agent, Lorraine Broughton (Ms. Theron), buzzsaws her way through an espionage ring in 1989 Berlin as she tries to solve the murder of a fellow spy. This is no teased-hair-and-Day-Glo sendup of the ’80s. The film is luscious and cool, and Ms. Theron’s Lorraine has the looks of Debbie Harry and the toughness of Chrissie Hynde.
She is also a ruthlessly efficient killer, laying waste to 200-pound men, flipping them and hurling them down stairwells and into walls. During production, Ms. Theron bruised her ribs, wrenched her knee and clenched her jaw so tightly that she cracked two teeth. “I was a nervous wreck,” said AJ Dix, a partner at Ms. Theron’s production company, Denver and Delilah, which helped produce the film. “Nothing scares her.”
Ms. Theron optioned the story before the graphic novel it was based on, “The Coldest City,” came out in 2012. She loved that Lorraine was impenitent and fought out of professional duty, rather than to avenge, say, the loss of a husband or child. (There are intimations that she had a personal connection with the dead spy.) Part of what is so arresting and even transgressive about the film is its forthright depiction of Lorraine’s battle wounds. Her face is bruised because she has done her job, not because she has been victimized.
“I became very aware of women in certain circumstances not being allowed to play by the same rules guys get to play by,” Ms. Theron said. “I was actively looking for a protagonist that could break those rules.”
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