Charlize Theron: A good lead female role is hard to find

Now that she’s starred in an adaptation of a Gillian Flynn novel, Charlize Theron has a foolproof plan for the rest of her acting career. “We’ve talked about it,” Theron says of Flynn’s future writing efforts. “All of her characters are going to be 5-foot-10 from now on. And flat-chested.”

All joking aside, despite being one of the most successful actresses in Hollywood, Theron is painfully aware of how rare it is in popular film to come across a fully realized female protagonist that has some edge to her — even with an Oscar under her belt. It’s really interesting when you get to play a women that is layered and conflicted and has certain human attributes that might not be that attractive, which is part of the human condition,” she says. “Somehow, because we haven’t seen enough of it in cinema, it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb and people comment on it.”

While she’s not a fan of the state of female characters in movies, she understands why people are focused on them. “People are talking about it because there has been such a lack of it,” she says. “I can’t say that I’m attracted to angry, dark people. I think what I’m attracted to is characters to me that feel very truthful to the embodiment of a full woman. It’s just refreshing to see women like Gillian write women like that. It feels authentic and real.”

Some keeping an eye on Theron’s career have suggested that she might be drawn to these types of darker roles because of her own rocky history — Theron’s mother shot and killed her abusive husband in self-defense in 1991. But the Oscar-winning actress insists those people are discerning connections where there aren’t any.

“It’s a very easy assumption to make that because I had a very tragic event happen in my life, that that was why I wanted to make this story, and it couldn’t be further from the truth. There really aren’t any similarities. The circumstances of this tragedy has absolutely nothing in common with the tragedy that happened in my life,” she says. “I think that the correlation in this that people can relate to is that we all come from this family structure that we don’t get to choose necessarily, and I have yet to meet somebody that doesn’t have some form of skeletons in their closet from the family life that they lived.”

Follow Ned Ehrbar on Twitter:@nedrick