Real question: why did Esquire’s Photoshop Wizards go crazy on Charlize Theron’s cleavage on this cover? Charlize is not crazy-busty or anything, but she’s got more than this. They actually put in effort to make Charlize look really flat. That whole chest area just looks like a cartoon. Anyway, Charlize covers the May issue of Esquire because she’s promoting Mad Max: Fury Road, which looks really and truly bonkers. In the interview, Charlize talks about her reported on-set fights with Tom Hardy and how much she adores Sean Penn.

On her on-set fights with Tom Hardy: “We f–kin’ went at it, yeah. And on other days, he and George [Miller, the director] went at it. It was the isolation, and the fact that we were stuck in a rig for the entire shoot. We shot a war movie on a moving truck — there’s very little green screen. It was like a family road trip that just never went anywhere. We never got anywhere. We just drove. We drove into nothingness, and that was maddening sometimes. It’s material that’s really frightening — we didn’t have a script. Tom and I are actors who take our jobs seriously. Both of us want to please the directors we work with, and when you don’t know if you can deliver on that, it’s a frightening place to be — and for Tom more than me, because he was stepping into big shoes.”

How her romance with Penn began: “We’ve been friends for twenty years. He was married, I was in a long-term relationship, our spouses—not regularly, but we were in each other’s lives. I think our friendship stemmed from mutual respect—more on my end, because I really didn’t have a body of work twenty years ago, but my love and passion for making films—that was our common ground. And also, Sean liked to have conversations outside of just making movies. That’s sometimes hard to find among friends here, and that’s where our friendship really blossomed.”

Friendship foundation: “It is nice to be in something where the friendship came first. I’ve never had that. There’s a weight to the relationship already that I don’t think you have when you just meet somebody and enter a relationship. There’s a foundation of 20 years that the two of us have shared with each other in all these different ways that is really the foundation of something that has brought a lot of beautiful things into my life. We get so stuck in wanting to predict the future that we forget the moment that we’re in. And the moment that we’re in is just really good.”

Life with Sean: “It’s really good, really nice. The marriage thing is always so strange to me anyway. I love the possibility of anything, but I’m really enjoying myself and the everyday moment and how that coincides with my son and my life and my friends. I’m a very, very, very lucky girl. Very lucky. He’s hot. He is hot. How do you say that in an interview? You’re a forty-year-old woman sounding like a sixteen-year-old. There’s something beautiful about that, but you lack the articulation of really saying what it’s like when somebody walks into your life and makes you see something that you really never thought you’d be able to see. If somebody had said to me, ‘This is what it will be,’ I would’ve said, ‘F— off.’ As you can see, it makes me smile.”

[From Yahoo & Us Weekly]

She says that at the end of the day, she respected Tom Hardy’s process because he didn’t “fake-smile” and go through the motions. She also says that Tom left her a gift in her trailer – a self-portrait he made with a red handprint on the back. This was what he wrote to her: “You are an absolute nightmare, BUT you are also f–king awesome. I’ll kind of miss you. Love, Tommy.” I feel like that’s probably high praise from Hardy.

As for the Penn stuff… I like it their relationship more when she’s describing it because it sounds real. When Sean talks about Charlize, it feels more like his midlife crisis or an attempt to one-up Robin Wright. Charlize also complimented Sean because he’s “not that guy” to think that he understands what happens in the world just because he watches CNN.

Photos courtesy of Esquire, WENN.