Did you know that a major Hollywood star was nearly paralyzed for life following a stunt gone wrong in the mid-2000s?
She is today one of the biggest Hollywood stars and perfectly at ease in action films, as evidenced by her muscular performances in Atomic Blonde, The Old Guard or the Fast and Furious saga. But almost twenty years ago, it was a matter of nothing, precisely a tiny centimeter, for Charlize Theron’s career to be suddenly and dramatically stopped…
“Within a centimeter…”
In September 2004, Charlize Theron, who today finds it much more difficult to get action scenes, shot the SF film Aeon Flux, a big screen adaptation of an animated series created almost a decade earlier and broadcast on MTV. Everything goes well until an action scene during which the actress injures her neck. She was then hospitalized for five days and had to complete six weeks of physiotherapy in order to recover.
What we don’t necessarily know is that this injury on the set of Aeon Flux not only almost put the film in danger. It could indeed have had much more dramatic consequences. “What happened on film was a very unfortunate accident, and it was very serious”declared the actress in 2017 at the microphone of the News site. “Within an inch, I was paralyzed for the rest of my life.”
“Eight years of dealing with pain”
“It’s something that really raised awareness for me”continues the actress. “I said to myself, ‘Okay, you have to be prepared.’ It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was just a freak accident where I ended up on my neck. I then spent eight years dealing with the pain , without being able to get rid of the spasms and nerve damage.”
After this rather frightening episode, Charlize Theron, whose ailments finally disappeared after an operation in 2013, has not said no to action films. She was just more attentive and listened to her body. “I love telling stories through the physical”she concluded in the interview with News. “I think it comes from being a ballerina, from the fact that I started out as a dancer. What interests me is not doing stupid things, but learning new things.”
Charlize Theron recently starred in “Fast and Furious X”: