Trigger warning: Mentions of domestic violence
Charlize Theron looked back at a traumatic period in her childhood when her mum shot her own dad in self-defense, amid the latter’s violent tendencies while intoxicated.
Theron opened up about her difficult childhood in South Africa, and her close relationship with her mum in The New York Times on April 18, sharing that while her alcoholic dad was never violent toward her, he would do “scary things” such as driving drunk.
But what led to her dad’s eventual death was the time when she and her mum came home after watching a movie, and they realised they were locked out.
“My dad had taken the key to the front steel door. Every room in our house had a steel door. So if you got into the front door, the kitchen had a steel door that you had to unlock, because that’s the kind of violence that we were living in,” she said.
“Our country was on the brink of civil war. So my mum couldn’t get into the first lock,” she added.
At the time, she and her mum knew that her dad was drinking at his brother’s house, they had no choice but to go there. However, Theron really had to go to the bathroom, so she ran, which her dad thought was “disrespectful” of her.
“Big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders. And he was in a state where he just spiraled. Like, ‘Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?’” she recalled, noting that she and her mum noticed “something different” in him at the time. Their instincts were right when her dad broke into the house later.
“I could tell the level of anger, frustration or unhappiness by the way he drove in. To get to the point: He finally broke into the house. He shot through the steel doors to get in, making it very clear that he was going to kill us,” she said.
As a result, Theron’s mum rushed to the safe to get the gun and protect her while they were holding the door. Her dad, at the time, kept shooting.
“And he just stepped back and started shooting through the door. And this is the crazy thing – not one bullet hit us. It’s insane when you think about it that way. But the messaging was very clear. I’m going to kill you tonight,” she said.
Theron then recalled her mum following her dad, who planned to get more weapons from the safe at the time.
“The brother ran down the hallway, and she shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand,” Theron recounted.
“It’s stuff you can’t explain. And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him.”
Despite the traumatic incident, the award-winning actress shared that her mother sent her to school the next day, a testimony to her strength. She eventually moved to Italy to work as a model before settling down in the United States.
While the memory doesn’t hurt Theron anymore, she hopes that there will come a time when gender-based violence will be taken seriously, saying that many women go through the same experience in their own homes.
“That night changed it because, in retrospect, once I got out of the shock of it, I realised that she saved my life. Which is a big thing. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story. These things are prevalent in a lot of homes,” she said.
“Women really get a very, very unfair shake, even in this country. Nobody takes it seriously, the situation that they’re in. And I don’t think anybody took my mum seriously,” she continued.
Theron is one of the lead stars of the action film Apex, set to be released on Netflix. She will also star in the epic fantasy The Odyssey. – Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network
