Charlize Theron just got through with telling some hard truths about how she and Tom Hardy did not get along at all while making Mad Max: Fury Road. That was just three weeks ago! And now she’s telling some hard truths about Tobey Maguire. Charlize and Tobey worked together on The Cider House Rules, a film which I still dislike. And I’m even a big fan of John Irving! But The Cider House Rules is easily my least favorite Irving book and film adaptation. Anyway, Charlize covers the new issue of V Magazine – James Franco, of all people, conducted the interview – and she mentions that she and Tobey didn’t get along. You can read the full interview here. Some highlights:

Franco says he heard a rumor that she didn’t get along with Tobey Maguire: “Tobey and I had a bit of a rough time, yeah. I mean, we’re good now. It was a difficult movie.”

What it’s like to fake chemistry with someone you don’t like: “There really is real power in substitution. The thing is, as an actor, you can’t just rely on one method. Every day is completely different for a completely different reason. Whether it’s the weather, or the writing isn’t there, or you don’t get along with your castmate, you have to be able to go to something else that’s just as powerful. Does it make it as enjoyable? Probably not. I mean, there were just a couple of days that Tobey and I had a rough time. The rest of the movie, we actually had a really good time. I love Tobey. I’m kind of glad we had that experience on that movie. It teaches you different things. It taught me that I could fall in love with somebody in my head while looking at someone else.”

Playing the Evil Queen: “Fairy tales are really f–king dark. I read them every night to my kids. That character, the Evil Queen, to me started off very like, Yuck. It’s too iconic. It’s just so one-note. Everybody knows who this person is. Then, the more I read the story, the more I realized she was a f–king serial killer. She had this God complex. The more I humanized her, the more she became broken to me, the more I realized how painful it must be to be alive for that long and just know one way of living, to never learn another way of living. It became brutal.”

The sister-on-sister drama in The Huntsman: “It’s brutal when you think of the truth of what we face in society, what it means for a woman versus what it means for a man. What we, especially women, consider to be our strengths and to be our weaknesses. That aging is a weakness, that we think of it that way. Yet, it’s when we’re at our wisest. We’ve experienced everything and we should be considering ourselves the richest. We live in a society where women are treated like wilted flowers. They used to be pretty, but now they’re just kind of wilting. The guy is like a fine bottle of wine. He just gets better and better with age. It became very real, the vanity of it all. That we are all animals of our circumstance. If you are raised to believe that your power is only good for as long as you’re beautiful, then that’s what you’re going to believe. If you’re a child growing up in a f–king racist community, then you’re going to grow up thinking black people are bad. Hopefully, you’ll find a different path somewhere along your life. If your circumstances are so enclosed in the environment that you were taught in, then that’s what you’re going to be. That’s what this character is.”

[From V Magazine]

There are several interesting anecdotes that I couldn’t even fit into this post, including how crazy she used to get on auditions when she was first starting out, and how she purposefully didn’t work for a year after she did 2 Days in the Valley. As for the stuff I did include… well, that’s where an actor interviewing an actor helps you. Obviously, there have been stories about Charlize and Tobey Maguire going around for years, but it was just random, insular gossip. Now we know that Charlize couldn’t pretend to fall in love with Tobey without picturing someone else’s face attached to his head. Also, I kind of love “we are all animals of our circumstance” as an explanation for institutional sexism.

Photos courtesy of V Magazine, WENN.