Charlize Theron, who snatched an Academy Award for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the biopic Monster, has told the outlet People that portraying ex-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in the to-be-released movie Bombshell was a harder task for her.
“She’s incredibly well known. I’ve never played anybody on that level. I’ve played real people that nobody knows about so there was less pressure when I did those”, the 44-year-old actress explained.
She revealed that she had doubts about whether she should play Kelly in the movie, also produced by her company Denver and Delilah, when she was first approached. She recalled herself thinking “Maybe there’s somebody out there who can do this better than you can”.
“But I was just really scared too. I honestly knew her so superficially”, the actress noted.
Earlier, Theron admitted to Variety that she did not know how complicated Kelly’s situation was.
“I think for a lot of people, they didn’t understand why she just didn’t speak up. She was in a complicated place, and as a human being, I have empathy for that. And I don’t think a lot of people truly understood that”, she suggested in an interview in March.
Bombshell, directed by Jay Roach, gives its version of the scandal around former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who stepped down in 2016 after several women, including Kelly, her colleague Gretchen Carlson, and several other women, claimed that he had harassed them. Ailes vehemently denied the allegations until his death in 2017.
Kelly herself left Fox News in 2017 for NBC News. However, her career there ended abruptly in 2018, as the broadcaster axed her morning talk show, Megyn Kelly Today, after her allegedly racist remarks.
Kelly drew the ire of her employers after she insisted that it was okay to put on blackface on Halloween and that some people are way too sensitive about it. "But what is racist?" Kelly asked her guests. "You truly do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween".
She later apologised on her show and said that she had "learned a lesson" about how blackface can be offensive to people of colour.
