Charlize Theron on Mad Max: ‘We live in a very toxic world’

“You’re either a really good mother,” says Charlize Theron, “or you’re a really good hooker. The problem with how movies represent women goes right back to the Madonna/whore complex. You can’t be a really good hooker-mother. It’s impossible.”

Theron, cool and blond and glossy, sips mineral water in front of the sea. In Mad Max: Fury Road, she wears engine oil as makeup and bandages as a blouse. She’s shorn-haired and short-tempered, a badass amputee called Imperator Furiosa. It’s she who orders around Tom Hardy’s Max. She who squires five sex slaves across the desert in a souped-up ute, fending off flame-throwing baddies with her high-tech claw.

How far George Miller’s movie foregrounds the role of women, even to the subordination of its apparent hero, has surprised many, Theron included. “Reading the script, part of me felt shocked at how much she was given and emotionally drives this story,” she says. Others have been appalled as well as surprised. One blogger in the US has called the film “Trojan horse feminism”, which pushes pro-female propaganda in the guise of a popcorn flick.

Theron smiles evenly in the face of accusations of agenda. “George [Miller] just showed the truth of who we are as women, and that’s even more powerful. Women thrive in being many things. We can be just as dark and light as men. We’re more than just nurturers, more than just breeders, we’re just as conflicted. Not to brag, but I think women are better at embracing the dichotomy of the yin and the yang than men.”

In Fury Road, Furiosa is a former sex slave, apparently driven into the wilderness after she proves infertile. Such women as can have healthy offspring become “high-prize objects – because to not have a fucking tumour on you is a fucking miracle. This is a world so poisoned it’s almost impossible to not have a child without disability. And that’s what’s so frightening,” she says. “At the end of the day, survival is about procreation. That’s our sustainability. We live in a very toxic world where cancer numbers are rising and we’re not paying enough attention to it.”

The continuation of the species will not, Theron thinks, result from the kind of “bloodline obsession” seen in the film, where the warload leader becomes fixated on trying to spawn a healthy male heir, but she does see similarities. “Look at North Korea. You’re just born a leader, and it’s not possible to maintain good leadership through that.”

Anywhere else? Maybe even in the UK, with the monarchy, and the political dynasties of the US?

“Very much so. And it’s strange to me how much people are affected by that in the voting process. It’s like they feel an immediate comfort, purely because someone was the brother or the father.” No mention of mothers. Not yet.