In an interview yesterday, Charlize Theron told NPR the story of how her mother killed her father in an act of self-defence. Theron was 15 when her dad shot through the door of the bedroom where she was hiding with her mum in 1991. ‘None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defence, she ended the threat,’ she told NPR. ‘The more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it.’
In the interview, Charlizedescribed how her father was an alcoholic, and spoke about how it was unpredictable living with him day-to-day: ‘The day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night.’
The incident happened, she says, when he was so drunk he ‘shouldn't have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun’. ‘My mom and I were in my bedroom leaning against the door, because he was trying to push through the door,’ she added. ‘So both of us were leaning against the door from the inside to have him not be able to push through. He took a step back and just shot through the door three times.’
Her mum, Gerda, did not face charges, with the incident being ruled as self-defence. ‘I'm not ashamed to talk about it, because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it,’ she said. ‘I think, for me, it's just always been that this story really is about growing up with addicts and what that does to a person.’
The actress - who is starring in Bombshell, a film about the real life sexual assault scandal at Fox News - also spoke about when a director inappropriately touched her after inviting her to audition at his home. She added, ‘I put a lot of blame on myself... that I didn't say all the right things, and that I didn't tell him to take a hike, and that I didn't do all of those things that we so want to believe we'll do in those situations.’ Bombshell is released on 24 January 2020.