While the film industry has made a number of progressive strides in recent years, there remain certain biases that are so engrained in the business that they have proven more difficult to remove. As Charlize Theron recently pointed out, there remains a distance between how the success of female-led action movies are judged in comparison to those with male heroes, and though she has obviously built a wonderful legacy in the genre, it remains a source of frustration for her.
Now available to stream with a Netflix subscription, The Old Guard 2 sees Theron team up with fellow modern action legend Uma Thurman, and in a recent New York Times interview with the two actors, the former didn't hide her feelings when asked about gender disparity in the genre. Asked if it's harder for an action movie with a female lead to get produced, Theron said,
Yeah, it’s harder. That’s known. Action films with female leads don’t get green lit as much as the ones with male leads. I think the thing that always frustrates me is the fact that guys will get a free ride. When women do this and the movie maybe doesn’t hit fully, they don’t necessarily get a chance again.
This is not just a double standard that Charlize Theron has objectively observed; she has personally experienced it. In 2005, she played the lead in Æon Flux, and when that movie turned out to be a major flop, it took many years before she got to play the lead in an action movie again. She had supporting roles opposite male leads in movies like Hancock and Mad Max: Fury Road, but it wasn't until 2017's Atomic Blonde that she got the opportunity to be front and center as an ass-kicker again. (It's worth noting at this juncture that while Atomic Blonde made more money at the global box office than the original John Wick, one has spawned three sequels and a spinoff while the other has had a single follow-up trapped in development hell for nearly a decade.)
Arguably the biggest problem with this is that it ends up putting a lot of extra pressure on the movies that do get made. While a star may have a string of hits, one disappointment could mean having to start at square one again. For Charlize Theron, that was something that she had in mind in the making of The Old Guard 2. She continued,
With this, we were very aware that eyes were on us. It’s not a risk that studios want to take, but they’ll take it many times on the same guy who might have a string of action movies that did not do so well.
One thing that can help ease the pressure of each movie for Charlize Theron is to keep working, and she has a couple of big projects on her plate. She is playing Circe in Christopher Nolan's upcoming epic adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey and she has already reteamed with Netflix for Apex: an upcoming action movie from director Baltasar Kormákur that sees the actor star as an adrenaline junkie who finds herself hunted while doing a bit of rock climbing. The film also stars Taron Egerton and Eric Bana and it filmed in Australia earlier this year.
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