(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 8 November 2025 20:45, UK
Charlize Theron has won an Oscar for portraying a real-life serial killer in Monster, battled aliens in Prometheus, traversed the Wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, and, the highlight of her career, playing Fezzik in that weird pandemic version of The Princess Bride, delivering to us the unforgettable visual of a role shared by her and André the Giant.
Another interesting role that didn’t involve lobbing rocks at people came in the 2019 biographical drama Bombshell, inspired by the real-life sexual harassment scandal featuring former CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes. A number of women who worked for the right-wing broadcaster, played in the movie by Theron, Margot Robbie, and Nicole Kidman, came forward and accused the powerful Ailes of mistreatment, which resulted in him stepping down from his position and was seen as a major victory for the nascent ‘MeToo’ movement.
Speaking at a Q&A after a screening of the movie, Theron revealed that she had initially been hesitant to take on the part of Fox presenter Megyn Kelly. “I was shit scared,” she said, calling the former America Live host “conflicting”, and as anyone who knows anything about Kelly and her long career in the spotlight, that word barely begins to cover it.
The anchor worked for Fox between 2004 and 2017, hosting some of the news network’s biggest shows and becoming one of its most recognisable faces alongside Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly. Even after leaving the station, she’s still an incredibly influential figure in the news sphere, recently hitting headlines for a massive rant she had against George Clooney. She was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2014 and again in 2025, but, like all figures associated with Fox News, she’s had her fair share of controversies.
Despite being a leading voice in criticising Donald Trump’s treatment of women during his 2016 election campaign, Kelly revealed that she voted for him in both 2020 and 2024. She’s advocated for armed security in schools to combat mass shootings and, just a few months ago, at the time of writing, called Palestinians “very good manipulators of media” in a discussion about the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
What made Bombshell such a fascinating project was its request for sympathy towards women who were part of an organisation responsible for spreading rhetoric that is, at some points, downright hateful. It reminded people that, regardless of their politics, nobody deserves to go through intimidation and violence, even if it is those who perpetrate it in many ways. Watching Robbie’s character get manhandled by Ailes (played by a heavily made-up John Lithgow) is incredibly disturbing, no matter where you land on the political spectrum, with Robbie herself having spoken about how disturbing she found the scene.
A lot has happened since 2019, with the divide in our society becoming exponentially deeper, and empathy from both sides seemingly in short supply, which raises a thought exercise of how Theron or anyone involved in Bombshell would feel about playing those characters in today’s landscape, or if a movie this nuanced would even get made at all.
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