Words I never would have put in the same sentence: “Charlize Theron” and “overweight.” But after gaining 50 pounds for her role as an overworked mom in new movie, Tully, the actress says it was harder than she thought it would be to get back in shape.
“I just I wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think [gaining weight] was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset,” Charlie told Entertainment Tonight. “You know, it was a huge surprise to me. I got hit in the face pretty hard with depression. Yeah, for the first time in my life I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar. I was not that fun to be around on this film.”
Charlize says she had three months to gain the weight. “The first three weeks are always fun because you’re just like a kid in a candy store. So it was fun to go and have breakfast at In-N-Out and have two milkshakes,” she said. “And then after three weeks, it’s not fun anymore. Like, all of a sudden you’re just done eating that amount and then it becomes a job. I remember having to set my alarm in the middle of the night in order to just maintain [the weight].”
“I would literally wake up at two in the morning and I’d have a cup of cold macaroni and cheese just next to me,” she said. “I would wake up and I would just eat it…I would just, like, shove it in my throat. It’s hard to maintain that weight.”
Charlize says she gained so much weight that her kids thought she was pregnant.
She ended up losing it but said the process was “hell.” “It took about a year and a half,” she said. “It was a long journey, very long journey.”
“And it’s hard because I had press junkets and movies around it and nobody knew that I had done it for this,” she said. “And I think in the beginning everybody thought I was wearing, like, when the first photos came out, everyone [thought it] was, like, prosthetics.”
This isn’t the first time Charlize has put on weight for a role: She gained 30 pounds to play real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. But while Charlize has said she loved gaining weight for that role, this time around was much more difficult.
“I was like, this is taking a really long time,” she said. “Because on Monster, I just didn’t snack for five days and I was fine.”
“You know, your body at 27 is a little different than your body at 43, and my doctor made sure to make me very aware of that,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “Like, you are 42, calm down, you’re not dying, all good.”
Stars! Their aging metabolisms are just like ours!
