(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still / Paramount Pictures)
Wed 30 April 2025 21:15, UK
If there’s one thing Charlize Theron knows how to do, it’s adapt to extreme characters.
The actor takes each dramatic performance to a new realm through her unflinching commitment and vivacity. Whether it be her role in Tully, the Mad Max series or Monster, the actor continuously challenges audiences through her shape-shifting abilities and unconventional roles, bringing a new host of unlikeable and conflicting female characters to the screen.
Starring in famously demanding projects that have tested her limits and pushed her to new extremes, from her work with Patty Jenkins that led to an Oscar win, to her upcoming role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, there is no obstacle too high for her to overcome.
However, this is a quality she first discovered in another actor, drawing inspiration from their similarly daring approach and carrying it with her for one story that had similar perimeters to another infamous film.
When we think of the depiction of madness on screen, we often think of Christian Bale’s performance in American Psycho or Rosamund Pike’s performance in Gone Girl. It’s a mental state that is hard to capture, given the extreme emotional strain it inflicts on the actor, and the genuinely unhinged nature that they have to depict, behaving in unpredictable and unplanned ways reflective of their dwindling grip on reality.
However, there is one performance that most commonly comes to the fore when conjuring the image of a truly insane and tortured character, and that is Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in The Shining. An actor and character that made history through the portrayal of a slow descent into insanity and the heightened effect of cabin fever.
For Theron, it was this performance that sprang to mind when finding inspiration for her character in Snow White and the Huntsman. She said, “I move a lot in this film. It was important for me to get across this sense of urgency. I think it was also that I needed to find out why my character, Queen Ravenna, was going mad. At first, I didn’t really understand why she was evil or losing her mind, but once I understood that it wasn’t just the fact that her mortality relied upon finding Snow White, and that knowing that and not being able to do anything and being stuck in a castle . . . Well, I think that would be maddening for somebody like her. It reminded me a lot of Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining—that idea that you’re stuck in this place and you can’t escape it, that cabin fever.”
Theron expanded, saying, “All that stuff made me realise that Ravenna had to move. So a lot of that is in the movie. She has areas in the castle where she has more energy, like in this ‘fire’ room where her mirror is, so she spends a lot of time there. And the moment that she does become still is really heartbreaking because it’s almost like watching an animal that should never be still, like a wild cat, become still. It just doesn’t feel right.”
Nicholson’s portrayal of Torrance can be defined by the ominous tracking shots that show his character slowly pacing around the hotel and hunting down his family members, with the confined space leading him to grow increasingly restless. There are many parallels to be drawn between Theron’s character, who is similarly trapped and begins a descent into the murky depths of evil, not to mention the gruesome end both characters meet. It’s no wonder she cites Nicholson’s iconic performance as her inspiration, giving her role the depth only Theron is capable of bringing to the table.
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