We ranked every one of Charlize Theron's movie performances, and there’s a lot of gold here
Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture and Photos by Paramount Pictures, Newmarket Films, Focus Features and Warner Bros. This article has been updated to reflect Charlize Theron’s most recent work.
Below is our ranking of every Theron performance. To be clear, we’re not ranking the movies but merely her role in them. We skipped voice performances — sorry, Kubo and the Two Strings — but we did include her one-scene parts when she was still an up-and-comer. There’s a lot of gold here — and even when the film she’s in lets her down, she’s always far more composed and commanding than when she bit that bank teller’s head off so long ago.
38. Trial & Error . Welcome to the brief moment of Michael Richards, leading man! This My Cousin Vinny knockoff — directed, like that film, by Jonathan Lynn — is a dull comedy that features Theron as a waitress who helps Jeff Daniels realize the woman he’s marrying isn’t good enough for him.
33. Men of Honor . You can probably tell from the title that we don’t get much Theron here, and this might be the most thankless of all her thankless wife roles as the wife of a Scuba chief commander who works with the first African-American Navy diver . The movie itself isn’t bad, but Theron might as well have a big sign around her neck that says “WIFE.” Theron was 24 when she made this movie; De Niro was 57.
29. Sleepwalking . Theron tried her hand at producing with this tiny indie about a girl overcoming her wayward mother and finding a home with her roguish uncle . Theron’s barely in this movie — she runs off with a trucker in the first 15 minutes — and the story is maybe a little too slight, and too small. It also features a very, very bad late-career performance from Dennis Hopper. Still, the movie is good-hearted enough.
24. Snow White and the Huntsman . After a few years working in indies, Theron did a double feature of studio blockbusters in June 2012 with Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus. The former was one of two Snow White projects that came out that year — remember Mirror Mirror? — and Huntsman was the far more serious, action-packed entry. She plays the evil queen who hangs out with her magic mirror and seeks to consume the heart of the fair Snow White .
19. The Burning Plain . The directorial debut of Guillermo Arriaga — known mostly for writing Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel — is a deadly serious chore to get through, but Theron’s excellent as a self-destructive woman with a horrible secret in her past. Curiously, that secret in her past happened when she was a very young woman and played by, of all people, a 17-year-old Jennifer Lawrence. The two actresses don’t look much alike today, but apparently Arriaga thought they did in 2008.
15. 2 Days in the Valley . Theron’s movie debut, filmed when she was 19 years old, it’s somehow a ripoff of both Quentin Tarantino and Robert Altman. Most of the massive cast gets lost, but Theron leaps off the screen as the soulless moll both seducing and battling an amusingly sinister James Spader. In a movie with Spader, Danny Aiello, Eric Stoltz, Teri Hatcher, and Jeff Daniels, it was Theron who made the poster, and for good reason.
10. Hancock . If you’re looking for the closest precursor to Theron’s no-nonsense, almost otherworldly cool in Atomic Blonde, go back to this Will Smith vehicle, in which she plays an alien superhero who was once married to the titular misanthrope. Hancock is an ambitious, nervy subversion of the comic-book movie that doesn’t quite work, but it’s not her fault.
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