Charlize Theron Won’t Gain Weight for Roles Anymore: ‘I Will Never Do It Again’

Charlize Theron will no longer sacrifice her body and wellbeing for roles. 

In a new interview with Allure, the Atomic Blonde star, 48, opened up about how changing her physical appearance in certain films has left lingering effects on her body.

“I will never, ever do a movie again and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll gain 40 pounds.’ I will never do it again because you can’t take it off,” Theron said. “When I was 27, I did Monster, I lost 30 pounds, like, overnight. I missed three meals, and I was back to my normal weight.” 

Charlize Theron in ‘Monster’.

Newmarket Releasing/Everett

Over 20 years later, Theron says that’s no longer the case. When she made Tully in 2018, she noticed a difference in adding pounds in her 20s versus adding pounds in her 40s. The movie required her to gain almost 50 lbs. to play a mother with postpartum depression.

It took Theron over one year to get back to her pre-production weight once Tully was complete. At one point, she even reached out to a doctor to determine why she could not seem to shed the pounds, she told Allure. “I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight,” she recalled telling her doctor.

Charlize Theron in ‘Tully’.

Kimberly French/Focus Features/Everett

However, the doctor told her everything was fine and the inability to drop the excess weight was simply an unavoidable side effect of aging. “He was like, ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was,’” she said of her doctor’s response. Theron confessed, “Nobody wants to hear that.”

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The Fast X actress went on to reflect on aging in Hollywood. “The thing that really bums me out is that I make action movies now and if I hurt myself, I take way longer to heal than I did in my 20s,” Theron told the outlet.

While on the topic, Theron noted that if she had to decide, she would prefer to have her body from 20 years ago over her facial features back then. “More than my face, I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow. Now, if I don’t work out for three days and I go back to the gym, I can’t walk,” she continued. 

Charlize Theron.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

She also wished she could see the world through the same rose-colored glasses as her daughters, claiming they “have no concept of what age is like.” Theron added, “They see somebody, they like what they’re wearing, or they think they’re pretty and they don’t really know if she’s in her 20s or she’s in her 60s. It’s so great. I love that. I wish we could just maintain that.”

Theron previously spoke about how difficult it was to gain and lose weight for Tully, compared to her experience on Monster, with PEOPLE in 2018.

Charlize Theron Developed Depression While Gaining 50 Lbs. for ‘Tully’ : ‘It Was a Huge Surprise’

“My body flipped me off quite a bit. It’s just way different when you’re older,” Theron said at the time. “Also this time around I dealt with depression for the first time in my life. I just didn’t eat very healthy and a lot of the processed sugars and things just really put me into a terrible depression, and I’d never dealt with anything like that in my life. It totally took me off guard.”

She finished filming Tully before Thanksgiving, and held off on dieting until after the holidays. “And then when January came around it was just like I could barely walk on a treadmill,” Theron told PEOPLE. “My body just didn’t respond like it did the last time I did this. It took like a year and a half for the weight to come off.”

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Source: HIS Education