You can win an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and star in a ton of blockbusters, and your kids still won’t think you’re cool.
Charlize Theron, who won an Academy Award for her role in 2003’s Monster, stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! on May 8. The conversation turned to her kids—she has two daughters, Jackson, 12, and August, 9—and whether they are impressed by their mom’s remarkable career.
“My children have zero respect for me,” said Charlize. “It’s just unbelievable. I feel like I’m pretty humble, but every once in a while I’m like ‘there’s a [explicative] Oscar right there.’ They are so not impressed with me.”
Charlize then told a story about picking up her youngest from dance class the day before. The two of them drove by a poster for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, in which Tom Cruise hangs off a plane, and Charlize remembered how she did a similar stunt for her new movie, Old Guard 2.
She and the producers choreographed an incredible scene of her “fighting helicopters and jumping on this real helicopter and hanging off. Shooting 99% of it on a real helicopter as it’s trying to shake me off like a rag doll.”
“We took like two weeks to shoot this sequence, and I was like, ‘Wow, I just did that, that’s really amazing,'” the Mad Max: Fury Road star said. “And my child yesterday just looked at this poster of Tom Cruise and went, ‘It’s weird, he looks so much cooler than you did when you were hanging off the helicopter.'”
“I was just like, ‘I hung off the helicopter, [give me] some credit?'”
Charlize adopted Jackson in 2012 and August in 2015. She has kept her kids out of the limelight, but in March, the actress posted a picture of them attending a Dua Lipa concert. “Oh, what a night!” she captioned the pictures.
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