Charlize Theron’s Depression

Apr 19, 2018 | 6:00 AM

Charlize Theron is no stranger to dramatic physical transformations for roles. (Exhibit A: Monster). She transformed her body again for her latest role in Tully, and while her weight-gain diet sounded like a fantasy at first, the reality was actually pretty grim, she said.

She sat down with Entertainment Tonight to discuss why gaining weight by ODing on milkshakes isn’t a piece of cake.

  • “I gained close to 50 pounds for this film,” Theron shared. “I just I wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think that was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset. 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.”
  • She had three and a half months to pack on the pounds, and Theron admits that at first, it was kind of awesome.
  • “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 explained. “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].”
  • In order to gain and maintain she took to shoving a cup of cold mac and cheese down her throat at two in the morning. Her kids, Jackson, 6, and August, 2, assumed she was pregnant.
  • “My little one was convinced that I had a baby in my belly,” she laughed. “I had a very similar moment with my older one. Like in the film, where she saw my body one day and was like, ‘Mom, what has happened to your body.’ It was a little too close to home. I shared it with [director] Jas[on Reitman] and I was like, ‘This is a little too real for me.’ And [my kids] still refer to this movie as the movie where mommy had a big belly.”
  • Losing the weight was no picnic either. “There’s nothing fun about that. It took about a year and a half. It was a long journey, very long journey,” she explained. “And it’s hard because I had press junkets and movies around it and nobody knew that I had done it for this. And I think in the beginning everybody thought I was wearing, like, when the first photos came out, everyone [thought it] was, like, prosthetics. And then I went on press junkets and it was like nobody knew.”
  • In Tully, Theron plays a struggling mother of three who is gifted with a nanny. The film opens May 4th.

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