It’s one thing to see yourself — topless — lit up on a 10-foot-long ad in every airport terminal in 12 time zones. It’s another thing when your kids do.
“My oldest was just so embarrassed,” says Charlize Theron of a recent walk past one of her Dior J’Adore ads. “She’s like, ‘Oh, my God, Mom! You’re not even wearing a shirt.’ I was like, ‘You’re right. I didn’t even realize.’ She's like, ‘All my friends are gonna see this. I mean, can you just wear a shirt?’”
This month, Theron is set to embarrass her daughters again as Dior launches L’Or de J’Adore, a reinvention of the now classic 24-year-old J’Adore perfume. These latest ads will mark almost two decades that she’s been the face of one of the world’s most wildly successful fragrance franchises. “I’m incredibly grateful for it and I’m really proud of it,” she says. “It has become somewhat woven into the fabric of my life for the last 20 years, which kind of makes it special.”
It’s a long time by any measure but it turns into dog years when you think about the fact that the rest of us — those of us who have walked through a Duty Free or past a bus stop or down a sidewalk — have been bearing witness every year along the way. We have seen Theron draped in a gold gown cut down to there or a gold gown cut up to there or no gown at all but generous amounts of gold lighting. We’ve watched her glide through liquid gold and use an impressive amount of upper body strength to hoist herself out of a pool of shimmering gold. We’ve seen her stand on top of a golden metropolis and sashay through a golden ballroom. We’ve admired her in gold earrings, gold necklaces, all kinds of gold makeup, and by my count, one black dress. After 19 years of being Dior’s golden child, Theron is not unlike the world’s most well-paid, glamourous goldfish.
For most of us, the aging process is not immortalized in the public record. In Theron’s case, every new Dior ad is like a yearbook—a senior page Groundhog’s Day of the girl most likely to win gold. “My face is changing, and I love that my face is changing and aging,” she says. But “people think I had a facelift. They’re like, ‘What did she do to her face?’ I’m like, ‘Bitch, I’m just aging! It doesn’t mean I got bad plastic surgery. This is just what happens.’”
You know what else happens? Double standards. “I’ve always had issues with the fact that men kind of age like fine wines and women like cut flowers,” she says. “I despise that concept and I want to fight against it, but I also think women want to age in a way that feels right to them. I think we need to be a little bit more empathetic to how we all go through our journey. My journey of having to see my face on a billboard is quite funny now.”
What the 48-year-old calls “movie magic,” the apparatus pulling the levers behind every image, is linked to our own eagerness to suspend our disbelief. We don’t really want her to age. We want time to stop, please, just for a little while longer, so Charlize can keep on being an action hero or plan a heist or kick someone’s ass. We just want her to keep being her so we can ogle and marvel and think, Christ, how does she do it?
“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,” she says. “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. Then I did it at 43 for Tully, and I remember a year into trying to lose the weight, I called my doctor and I said, ‘I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight.’ And he was like, ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was.’ Nobody wants to hear that.”
Even in 2023, in a world of acceptance and body positivity, “that stuff is hard,” she says. “I’ve always found it so funny when I’ve gained weight for movies and then had to go onto a red carpet.” Theron talks about her stylist Leslie Fremar as if she may or may not be her guardian angel. “I call her and say, ‘I’m doing this movie about postpartum depression and I’ve gained like 40 pounds.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh! How am I gonna dress you?’ It’s not something that you can just figure out last minute,” says Theron, pausing to explain their process. “She’s put a lot of blazers over open backs for me.”
The actress also points out a problem you don’t anticipate when you’re young — or not a famous action hero. “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. 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. I can’t sit down on the toilet,” she says, laughing. “It’s all those very real moments.”
These days, Theron, who also oversees the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, is keenly aware of her legacy and of how being a mother somehow makes you more aware of aging, of taking stock of your decisions, your life, all the stuff in your wake. My daughters “have no concept of what age is like,” she says. “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.”
But, of course, we can’t. We all age, the only constant is change and all that. Except maybe in the time vacuum of the international departures terminal and a certain very golden fragrance ad.
Read more celebrity interviews:
- Mindy Kaling on the Unique Struggles of Melasma on Darker Skin
- Sarah Jessica Parker on the Realities of Aging: "I'm Not Delusional"
- Lana Condor on How Being Adopted Shaped Her View of Beauty
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