Charlize Theron is still promoting Tully, which is why she’s still talking about the 50 lbs she put on to play a woman who is a mother of three small children. Charlize wanted to look “recently postpartum” and she didn’t want to wear a fat suit. I wish I could take a job that involved me getting paid to put on 50 lbs, but for Charlize, it was a hellish scenario involving “emergency mac & cheese” being consumed at 2 am just to put on weight. As I said before, putting on the weight is the easy part, and after a certain age, it’s pretty easy to keep the weight on too. But for Charlize, everything is a struggle! Anyway, Charlize appeared on The Ellen Show and she confessed her secret weight-gaining weapon: potato chips.
On Wednesday’s episode of The Ellen Show, Charlize Theron opened up about how she gained 50 lbs. for the film, in which she plays an exhausted mother of three who befriends her new nanny. “I ate a lot of everything, but my drug of choice is potato chips,” she said. “I ate them everywhere. I had a bag in my car, a bag in the bathroom, a bag in the kitchen, a bag on the counter, a bag in my trailer. Everywhere I went there was just a bag.”
This time, though, she acknowledged it was harder to bounce back. “I was younger [during Monster], I was like 27,” Theron, now 42, said. “I just didn’t snack for a week and I was back into shape; it was insane. That doesn’t happen anymore!”
Theron also opened up about how her diet for the role affected her mental health. “The hardest thing for me was I wasn’t prepared for how that amount of processed food will affect your mood,” she said. “I dealt with depression for the first time. What they say about ‘what you eat is who you are’ is so true, because I ate like a person who just didn’t move and I felt like that,” she continued. “I was lethargic and tired all the time, and that was a hard thing to break. Because it’s more mental than it is almost physical.”
As an actor, though, she emphasized how important the transformation was for her to get into character. “Mothers do this every single day—they get pregnant and they gain all that weight, and it takes them a year and a half to lose it and if they don’t they get judged,” said the mother to Jackson, 6, and August, 2, both of whom she welcomed through adoption in 2012 and 2015, respectively. “And I feel like I had to do it for the film.”
I think she’s being pretty generous with the assessment that women only get judged if they don’t lose the baby weight after 18 months. Hollywood sets the standard and let me tell you, women get judged a lot if they haven’t dropped the weight in less than SIX months. And yes, all of it is bullsh-t. I hate that. As for the potato chip thing… potatoes are my biggest weakness, and they would be my go-to snack if someone – Celebitchy?!?! – wanted to pay me to gain 50 lbs. For me, it would be all about potato chips and French fries and chocolate milkshakes and fried chicken. Sigh…
Photos courtesy of WENN.
My drug of choice is and always will be, I am afraid, french fries.
It used to be potato chips (or crisps as we call them here) but they sort of discust me a little now. They are only a PMS last resort.
Any and all potatoes for me ! I love crisps ! Whenever I go to the U.K. I bring back cheese and onion crisps and monster munch (pickled onion). Glad I can’t get them here as I’d eat too much !
I was all over crisps when I arrived here. Salt and Vinegar were my favorites!
Ha ! And don’t get me started on chips from the chip shop…so good ! I love British potatoes. I’d eat those every day if I lived in England.
Lol at 18 months or even 6. Women in Hollywood get judged the moment that baby comes out and their bodies don’t magically snap back. They’re supposed to make pregnancy look magical and beautiful while gaining as little weight as possible, and then miraculously get their prepregnancy figure back immediately just by “running after the kids”.
I’m sorry but she didn’t had to eat only junk food to gain weight and be depressed because of it. She can put weight with health food – like lots of carbs and protein shakes. No need for processes food and white sugar.
That is what I find bizarre. She could have just loaded up on carbs with pizza, pasta, lots of heavy sauces, rice, baked potatoes etc. She does not seem to have the morphology of very skinny people who simply will not put on weight. She comes across as someone who has a rigorous diet and therefore could very easily gain.
Methinks humblebragging.
I have a soft spot for her cranky acting and her intelligent choice of roles but her persona is sometimes a little off to me.
OR to take it another step, they could have just hired someone who wasn’t model thin to begin with.
That would mean eating a lot of volume. If you’re thin and naturally have a small to normal appetite, suddenly eating huge bowls of pasta, whole pizzas, tons of potatoes etc. everyday is going to be extremely uncomfortable. If you’re not used to over-eating, continuing to eat past the point you’re full gets extremely unpleasant and difficult fast.
I used to be an athlete. When I was in competition my food intake had to double to keep up with what I was burning each day, and it was honestly hell. I remember seeing competitors break down crying as they tried to basically force feed themselves. It was more mentally exhausting than the actual competition.
Charlize is tall and active. She probably had to eat 5000-6000 calories a day to gain that much reasonably quickly. That’s a hell of a lot of protein shakes and baked potatoes, whereas you can easily get halfway there with just one large fast food meal and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
@Jussie
Charlize is not an athlete! She was not burning calories and fat while gaining muscle like you.
You just need to increase portions progressively as your stomach expands and adapts to your food intake. Just ask anyone who’s taken on weight without even noticing and not eating particularly bad. She was not eating to become obese, just to have the body of a woman who had just given birth and let herself go a little.
50 pounds is a lot. That’s about 150,000-200,000 extra calories. Over 3 months, that would be an extra 2,000 calories on top of what she would already be eating. If it was over less time, it would be even more per day.
I had a baby three weeks ago and gained a total of 50 pounds throughout my pregnancy. 30 pounds have already fallen off but I think about these extra 20 pounds everyday. I weigh myself first thing every morning and get annoyed if the number stays the same from the previous day. It’s hard not to obsess and feel like everyone is judging how fast you “snap back”.
Okay. Stop weighing yourself every day. You’re hurting yourself. Those 20 lbs, should they choose to go, will go. Or, love the extra curves and love your baby.
Don’t give in to the madness. (I have two sons. Trust. I understand.)
I didn’t lose the last of my baby weight until I STOPPED weighing myself! Weighing myself was just a mindf*ck. Oh, my weight dropped a lot, hooray, I can relax and eat some of the stuff I’ve been denying myself (weight comes right back on, with interest). My weight hasn’t budged, this is so depressing, I’m going to bury myself in a bag of chips. On and on. So awful. Finally I got sick of it and promised myself that for one month I would not weigh myself at all but I would write down everything I ate in MyFitnessPal. I gave myself an allowance of up to 2,000 calories/day and pretty much stayed just a little under that for the entire month. I have no idea how much I lost that month (because I just kept on and haven’t resumed weighing myself), but I definitely lost SOMETHING, and then I kept on and eventually more and more of my pre-baby clothes fit again. Not weighing myself really allowed me to focus more on whether I was choosing foods that would promote health, sustainable weight loss, keep me feeling full, etc. I was amazed at how much of a difference it made.
I just can’t like her for some reason. I don’t quite know why.
Charlize sends a lot of mixed messages and I always get the feeling of someone who either talking for the public or isn’t even honest with themselves. Not about potato chips but when she goes on and on how perfect her life is all the time, in between all the problems, it really is quite odd and a bit off putting. Not unlikable necessarily just dealing with a lot more than she lets on. To me, she seemed a lot more comfortable in interviews during that time with Sean.
Holy smokes! I thought that bottom photo was Cameron Diaz until I recognized that shirt!
Cameron Diaz wishes to have that skin (unfortunately – I’m not making fun of her).
That’s who she looks like there! I couldn’t figure it out,now I can’t unsee it
Jussie, when I had to put on weight for my training I did just with protein+carb shakes cause I couldnt eat as much as I needed.
She said she was force feeding herself junk food – completely unnecessary!
She just wants the narrative that she suffered for the role – people love that.
And yes they should have just hired an “fat” actress but !surprise! there isnt any with a big name to carry a movie.
Yes, I agree, she is feeding the narrative of the “sacrifice for the role” which sounds particulalry terrible here as she looks like the average woman. If you listen to her it’s ike she was trying to become obese which, considering this is such a sore subject for women in general, sounds a bit callous.
But that’s Charlize. Still like her acting though.
There are plenty of actresses out there that aren’t model thin. Not to mention, women who had just had a baby themselves. This whole thing is a vanity move for awards. “I’ve sacrificed! See?!?”
Ir did work out, though, that high fat processed foods also made her almost as depressed as a woman with postpartum. Hopefully it won’t leave any lingering effects on her health over the long term.
The very sensible and veggie loving side of me would want to just eat more ~clean~ carbs and do it the healthy way. But the salt fiend in me would say, eat those chips! I can’t knock her too much because when I was underweight, I once happily ate half a bag of tortillas as part of my lunch. Right away, though, I realized I couldn’t make that a habit, but it was fun for the moment.