Honestly Charlize

Charlize Theron was on Jay Leno this evening. She seemed nervous. I think part of that is possibly because she must think of herself as an imposter. It's a very unnatural place for a South African Benoni girl to be - Hollywood I mean. It's even harder to walk the walk and talk the talk (she does both) and carry it off as though it's your own. Because it's not her own, she's not American and her first language is not the language she speaks (perfectly) on screen. She says she is not comfortable in front of a large audience, and Leno provides a clip where she does something quite bizarre. She is at an awards ceremony and walks off stage and between the audience to literally kiss the rear end (covered in a black dress of course) of Shirley MacLaine. As she walks back to the stage, Ms MacLaine gives her a friendly shove.

To explain this bizarre behaviour, Charlize explains that she took pain pills for a neck injury, and, when mixed with alchohol they produced...well, a high. Does she look high in the clip. Yes. Very.

Perhaps her nervousness has something to do with what happened recently to Kate Moss. Or maybe not. Charlize, in a beautiful sky blue dress with plunging V neckline, blinks beautiful blue eyes under wheat blonde hair. She can't remember that 'Frankenstein' is that monster with the bolts in his neck...she's trying to explain that she walked like him after injuring her neck. It's refreshing to see an actress of her calibre appear so...well, human. Do the guests on Jay Leno get prepped beforehand? If so, Charlize didn't prep very well for this appearance, but what shines through even brighter, I think, is her nature, and her charm.

Cue the next clip. I don't remember the name of the flick (the pictures above are for a sci fi movie called Neon Flux) but Charlize enters an assembly full of hicks, and she's, I guess, the chick hick. She seems to like these roles, and certainly plays them plausibly (as she did in Monster). The preview I saw of Neon Flux appears to be an exception to that statement; the special effects didn't seem very special, the film had an immediately artificial feel about it.

In the interview with Leno, Charlize talks about wanting to be 'honest'. I think the grittier roles suit her better than the Sharon Stone scripts, especially because they require more sincerity to portray. She has the background, one suspects, for her to be able to identify closely with some of the hardships of the 'common American'.

Whether she is nervous or not, it would be nice to see her portray herself as elegantly as the icon she is becoming. Nicole Kidman is no longer a work in progress in the sense that her style and identity is clearly etched in filmography by now. Kidman has that grace about herself, without losing her sense of humor. But Kidman is older, and wiser after her marriage. We will have to see what fortunes honesty will really bring to Charlize in Hollywood. I suspect she will need something sturdier than that to keep the dogs at bay, but the twinkle in her eye suggests she's well aware of that.