Charlize Theron recalled feeling alone after her mother fatally shot her father in self defense.
The Academy Award winning actress detailed the lead up to the fatal 1991 encounter — and its aftermath — during a raw new interview with the New York Times, divulging that she thought she and her mother “were the only people” affected by such incidents.
“I think these things should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone,” she told the outlet in the interview published on Saturday.
“I never knew about a story like that,” she continued. “When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people. I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.”
The “Atomic Blonde” actress, now 50, recalled she and her mother, Gerda Jacoba Aletta Martiz, had visited her uncle’s home after going to a movie — and that she’d upset her father, Charles Theron, by not announcing her arrival before rushing into the bathroom.
“I had to pee really badly,” she explained. “So I ran into the house to get to the toilet, and he took that as me being rude, because I didn’t stop and say hello to everybody.
She added, “Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like: ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?’”
Theron, who was 15 at the time, remembered leaving, and asking her mother to help her avoid a later confrontation with her father.
“I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, ‘When he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I’m asleep,’” she told the outlet.
“I went into my room, I turned my lights off, and I was scared. My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration, or unhappiness by the way he drove in.” She noted that she “just knew something bad was going to happen.”
The “Fast X” actress then recalled that her father “broke into the house,” shooting “through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us.”
Charlize recalled knowing the encounter was “serious,” and recounted her mother running to a safe to retrieve her own firearm before returning to her daughter’s bedroom.
“The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it,” she told the outlet.
“He just stepped back and started shooting through the door,” she continued, adding that it was “crazy” that “Not one bullet hit us.”
“The messaging was very clear: ‘I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun,’” the actress recalled.
She also recalled that both her father and uncle, who had allegedly accompanied Charles, were shot. “He walked to the safe, and my mom pulled the door open while the brother was still standing there,” Theron said.
“The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand. It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”
Charlize said following the deadly incident, her mother “picked right up” and moved on.
“The next morning she sent me to school. She was just like, ‘We’re going to move on.’ Not necessarily the healthiest thing, but it worked for us.”
The “Mad Max: Fury Road” star said her mother wanted her “to forget about it” and “didn’t want [her] to sit in it.”
“We didn’t have therapists around, so in her head the best therapy was, ‘We’ve got to move on,’” Charlize concluded. Gerda faced no charges — the shooting was ultimately ruled as self-defense.
This isn’t the first time the celebrated “Monster” actress has reflected on the “trauma” of her father’s death and gender-based violence.
“Gender-based violence is so in your face in South Africa and globally,” she told Town & Country magazine in 2023. “It’s hard to not be aware of these things just purely by being a woman.”
In 2019, she divulged that her father had been inebriated during the alleged encounter. “My father was so drunk that he shouldn’t have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun,” she told NPR at the time.
“I’m not ashamed to talk about it, because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realize we are not alone in any of it.”
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