Charlize Theron covers the December issue of Vogue Magazine to promote her new film, Young Adult. This film is a total break from the epic depression-fest films Charlize usually makes. Young Adult was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, reuniting for the first time since Juno. I’ve included the trailer at the end of the post – I think it looks really good, honestly. Anyway, I usually find Charlize’s interviews pretty boring, just because she’s not a scandalous person or a famewhore or anything, but she does do some opening up. You can read the full piece here, at Vogue, and here are some highlights:

Winning her Oscar: “The Golden Frog, you’re talking about?” Theron asks coyly. Winning the Oscar was “amazing,” she says. The night she was up for it, in a shimmering Gucci dress, she felt “like a princess.” At the last second, Diane Lane switched her seat so Theron’s mother, Gerda, could be next to her when the envelope was opened. “It was life-changing—it opened a lot of doors,” says Theron, who was nominated again for 2005’s North Country. “But it made people have a lot of opinions about what should happen next. You realize quickly that you can never please everybody.”

Young Adult: Theron plays Mavis Gary, a lonely, binge-drinking writer of serial teen romances who makes an awkward return to her Minnesota hometown, trying to win back her married high school boyfriend, Buddy Slade (played by Patrick Wilson). Mavis is a hot mess—icy and self-absorbed on the surface, but reeling underneath.

Working again after taking a break: Young Adult is Theron’s first major movie role in three years, and in the middle of filming she had a revelation. “I realized how much I love what I do,” she says. “I really, really missed it. Like around week three, I had this horrible, sappy moment where I got a little overwhelmed. It was just a really great f–king experience.”

The Stuart Townsend breakup: “I’d gotten out of a relationship, and I was in this really floaty place. My feet weren’t touching the ground. I just kind of turned to [Reitman] and was like, ‘I feel like me again.’” The relationship, of course, was Theron’s longtime partnership with the Irish actor Stuart Townsend, whom she dated for almost ten years. When the pairing began to falter, Theron says, she was desperate to save it; acting took a backseat. “It was sinking, and I had to give it a fight,” she says. “I really wanted to try and make it work. That was the priority. I wouldn’t do it any different way.”

Being a single girl: As we meet, Theron is single—a foreign experience. “I’ve never been single,” she says. “This is the first time in my life. From the time I was nineteen, I’ve been in relationships, literally gone from one to the other within a month. It’s been good for me. I’m a creature who’s really found her comfort zone in relationships. It’s been nice to rediscover myself,” Theron says. “I had to make a real conscious effort to do it—it’s hard. It’s much easier to lose yourself in flowers and cigarettes and coffee with somebody else.”

She quit smoking: Theron quit smoking a while ago but refuses to go into detail of how she did it, not wanting to jinx it. “I was highly addicted,” she confesses. “I thought, I don’t smoke like normal people. I smoke to die.”

On Kristen Stewart and Snow White and the Huntsman: Theron plays Ravenna, the Evil Queen hell-bent on destroying the princess played by Kristen Stewart, the brooding Twilight comet endlessly chronicled in celebrity weeklies. “She just turned 21,” Theron says of Stewart. “She’s a child. When I think about myself at 21, I had just done The Devil’s Advocate, and Keanu [Reeves] had paparazzi following him and Al Pacino said this thing to me: ‘If I knew that my life would be under this kind of scrutiny, I would have never become an actor.’ And I thought, Wow. I couldn’t comprehend it. And Kristen is just living this to the max and still has a sense of humor about it. There’s this really lovely quality about her that just doesn’t give a f–k. A lot of people say they don’t, but then they go home and cry and pop a Xanax. Kristen actually doesn’t give a f–k. That’s what’s so refreshing about her. I’m looking forward to killing her and taking her beauty,” Theron says. “That’s what happens, right?”

Paparazzi and fame: “Some people are really into that world, of being photographed, being at the party, being with the guy, being in the Bentley,” she says. “Good for them, because it’s so entertaining to watch. It’s just not me.”

She wants kids: “I do want to have kids, yeah,” she says. “I always have. I’ve never had a rush for it, a moment where I really wanted to do it. I don’t have a panic about it.” Lots of kids? “I don’t think about the amount so much. You have to be aware of what you can give. I don’t know where I’m going to be in five years. I might be in a place where I’m like, ‘Yeah! Six!’” Theron laughs. “I don’t think it will ever be that,” she says.

[From Vogue]

I bet she still gets high, don’t you? I bet she quit smoking cigarettes but she still smokes pot. She seems all chilled out, like an aging hippie pothead. As for her breakup with Stuart Townsend, that still upsets me. They were together for so long! And he’s so cute and Irish! That just shows me that you can spend 10 years bangin’ some hot Irish dong, and you can still have relationship problems. That’s something that Michael Fassbender and I will have to discuss.

Here’s the Young Adult trailer:

Photos courtesy of Vogue – slideshow here.