DECEMBER
FA
LLMOVIE
PR
EVIEW
Charlize Theron has
built her career on
metamorphosis. The
44-year-old actress
gained 30 pounds to play a serial
killer in 2003’s Monster and shaved
her head to play the battle-scarred
Furiosa in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury
Road. But her latest shape-shift is
perhaps her most uncanny yet:
Theron stars as Megyn Kelly in
Bombshell, Jay Roach’s drama about
the downfall of notorious news
titan Roger Ailes (John Lithgow).
With a bleached-blond bob,
pursed lips, and a few well-placed
prosthetics, Theron’s transforma-
tion is eerily accurate as Kelly,
who in 2016 joined multiple Fox
News employees to accuse Ailes
of sexual harassment. But when
Theron first read Charles Ran-
dolph’s script, she was reluctant to
play such a polarizing figure.
“Everyone knows exactly who
you’re talking about when you say
‘Megyn Kelly,’ ” she explains. “It’s
not like when I played Aileen
Wuornos [in Monster] and people
were like, ‘Oh, who is that?’ ”
Her friend Roach, who directed
HBO’s Game Change, helped sway
her, and the two set out to tell a
story not about Ailes but the
women around him: In addition to
Theron’s Kelly, Nicole Kidman
stars as Gretchen Carlson, the for-
mer Fox & Friends cohost who first
filed a lawsuit against Ailes alleging
years of sexual harassment. Mar-
got Robbie plays the fictional Kayla
Pospisil, an amalgamation born of
the actual testimonies from Ailes’
accusers. (Ailes denied all allega-
tions before his death in 2017.)
Roach acknowledges that his
perspective was limited as a man
telling a story about women, so he
and Theron spoke to “dozens” of
people close to the real-life scandal
for insight. “We felt such a sense of
responsibility since it’s a story
about women speaking up and
being heard,” the director says.C
↑ Charlize Theron (far right) on acting with (from left) Margot
Robbie and Nicole Kidman: “Every day was pretty special.Squad