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Charlize on her new movie, getting dirty, and more | 11524__theron_l
SITTING PRETTY ''I'm not working for the rest of the year,'' Theron told EW. ''I want to just spend some time with me.''
Charlize Theron Photograph by James White

It's been a year and a half since Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar for her ferocious performance in the 2003 film Monster, in which she transformed herself from stupefyingly beautiful screen siren into horrifying serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Figuring out how to maintain career velocity after an Oscar victory can be one of the trickier (if more enviable) dilemmas in Hollywood, as evidenced by some of Theron's predecessors on the podium, like Hilary Swank and Halle Berry. Since that Oscar night, Theron has marked time in smallish projects: the little-seen World War II drama Head in the Clouds, in which she costarred with boyfriend Stuart Townsend; the HBO biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; and TV's Arrested Development, on which she's doing a five-episode stint as a wacky British woman.

Now Theron, 30, is pulling out the big guns. In the drama North Country, she plays a Minnesota single mother who brings a sexual harassment class-action lawsuit against the iron mine where she works. In December, she dons a skintight suit to play a badass futuristic assassin in Aeon Flux, adapted from a cult anime series. One is a socially conscious piece of Academy catnip, the other a shiny hunk of would-be blockbuster entertainment; together they present a formidable combination-punch answer to that perennial post-Oscar question: Where do you go now?

As obviously proud as she is of North Country, Theron herself has a low tolerance for hype. In a conversation that ranges from sexual harassment to career calculations to the tabloids, she punctures BS at every turn with plainspoken frankness. Welcome to Theron Country. Leave your preconceptions at the border.


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