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Last week, Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” became Universal Pictures’ highest-grossing film of all time, grossing $1.68 billion and counting.
“I feel like I got a great invitation to the best party in town, and I don’t
know how I got it, but I’m really glad I got invited,” Oscar winner Charlize Theron told Variety on Saturday night. (For the record, Theron stars in two of the studio’s top 10 movies, with 2017’s “Fate of the Furious” coming in at No. 6.)
But the box office milestone wasn’t really the figure Theron had at the top of her mind. She was more focused on how much money she could raise for her foundation, the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Program — which works to strengthen the health and safety of youth in Southern Africa. CTAOP hosted its 6th annual block party on the Universal backlot with a guest list that included January Jones, Nick Kroll, Patton Oswald, Skye P. Marshall, Jeannie Mai, Heather Gay, Natalie Martinez, chef Andrew Zimmern, Thaddeus LaGrone, Aggy K. Adams, Shudu Musida, Naledi Masilo, Michelle De Leon, Max Talisman, as well as NBCUniversal Entertainment chairman Donna Langley.
“Universal truly is my family,” Theron said. “I owe so much to Donna Langley, and to Michael Moses and Peter Cramer. All of them have stood by me for my entire career.”
Speaking of family, Theron is also expected to reprise her role as the villainous Cipher in “Fast Forever,” the final installment of the “Fast and Furious” franchise. Vin Diesel declared the film’s script is “the best [he’s] read in decades,” but he hasn’t shared a copy with Theron yet. “He’s very secretive,” she explained.
But what would a happy ending look like for someone like Cipher?
“That is a difficult thing,” Theron said, pondering the character’s fate. “She’s a tricky bitch. She’s messy. I don’t know. I’m sure Vin will come up with a great way for her to … I almost said die, but I guess she doesn’t have to die, right?” (With a spinoff series in the works at Peacock, it’s safe to say any fate is possible for the massive ensemble cast.)
Now back to the topic at hand: next year, CTAOP will turn 20 and, to date, has served over 80 organizations, reached over 4.8 million youth and granted $16.5 million to local grassroots organizations.
“The success of CTAOP is understanding the importance of a community here — because without this community, other communities on the ground can’t do the work,” Theron said about CTAOP’s supporters.
“It’s also just good for the soul to see that people care,” she continued. “It’s such a misconception that Americans don’t care about what’s going on in the rest of the world. If anything, I think they do. There’s a big percentage of the population that understands that less than 1% of [America’s] overall budget going to foreign aid and saving millions and millions of lives is a good thing. And I really hope we can get back to those times, because people are dying.”
Here, Theron grew particularly impassioned, explaining that people try to oversimplify the situation. “The truth is, we’re taking so many steps back,” she said. “To not think that all of this is going to affect us in the long term makes it hard to not see the geopolitical side of it. If you take away the humanitarian out of it — what’s important to you? Is it the safety of wanting to know that you’re safe here in America? Then you should care about other people as well.”
As CTAOP works toward that 20th anniversary, Theron said her “ridiculous hope and dream is to say we don’t have to do this anymore. It’s solved. But I don’t think that that’s going to be the case.”
“If anything,” she explained, “I think we’re leaning into a year where we really have to spend real money toward organizations that really, really work on the ground with gender-based violence. The femicide happening in South Africa right now is beyond brutal.”
The horrors for women and girls are prevalent everywhere, Theron said, but her native South Africa is particularly devastated by it.
“Every morning, I get on my feed and I hear of another young woman’s body that was found in a dump in East Rand, where I grew up. And it’s like nobody cares. Nobody’s talking about these things,” Theron added, growing impassioned. “The value of women’s lives should matter. And when you find a young woman’s body in a dump, that should be the most important thing that we’re talking about.”
Scroll for a look inside the starry celebration, which raised more than $1 million for the organization.
