by MATTHEW HAYS

To say that Charlize Theron is a photogenic beauty would be something of an understatement. She's dressed casually, sitting down with me to discuss her stunning turn in Monster, a role that has become the most talked about of the year. After copping the Golden Globe on Sunday and getting the Oscar nod on Tuesday, the consensus is that Theron is a shoo-in come Feb. 29, Oscar night.

But Theron is busy apologizing to me for being a day late. Her flight was stuck in Chicago after she did Oprah, and now her hefty interview schedule has been pushed back - again. It's hard to tell, peering through the lens of celebrity, but Theron seems genuinely devoid of supermodel attitude. She wants to talk about the actor's work, getting into character, and the weight of responsibility she felt when taking on Aileen Wuornos, a figure both hated and celebrated, a poor incest survivor who was often homeless, who took to prostitution as a means of survival. It was after some brutal run-ins with violent johns whom she picked up on the highway that Wuornos had had enough and shot back. Seven dead men later, Wuornos was picked up by authorities in a sting operation and ultimately placed on death row in Florida. Two years ago she was executed.

Theron and Wuornos: it's a jarring and unsettling contrast. But as the South-African-born Theron explains it, she owes the success of the role to Monster's writer-director, Patty Jenkins, who saw Theron in Devil's Advocate and sensed that this actor, primarily relegated to ingenue roles, could take on the physical and emotional challenge of portraying Wuornos. "I was honoured but reticent when Patty first contacted me," says Theron. "But reading the script, I felt very drawn in."

Come on Aileen

Jenkins says Wuornos's story captivated her from the first moment she encountered it. A graduate of the American Film Institutes Directors Program, Jenkins had several award-winning short films under her belt when, three years ago, she decided she wanted to delve into the Wuornos tale at dramatic feature length. The story had already been told in documentary form, in Nick Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), which the filmmaker has since updated with co-director Joan Churchill in Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, currently in limited release in the U.S.

A striking, walking mass of contradictions, Wuornos's considerable appeal as a dramatic subject was immediate for Jenkins. "If you've seen the documentaries, if you've actually seen Aileen, you know about the extent of the volatility, the fury," says Jenkins. "The place of that rage was frightening. When she would smile and have those vulnerable moments, she was heartbreaking, you wanted to wrap your arms around her. I couldn't actually think of anyone who'd played a role like that before. People have played hookers before, sure, they've shown that they can be brave. But they've got to play this part as vulnerable as well. It was going to be a really hard shoot. When I wanted Charlize and announced that she had the role, everyone said it was unbelievable. I always believed she could do it."

Much has been made of the makeup Theron wears for the role: a layer of fake skin was pasted onto her face, allowing for the appearance of freckled, sun- and booze-damaged skin. She wore contact lenses to make her blue eyes brown. She gained 30 pounds (yes, her turn is evoking comparisons to Robert De Niro's legendary Raging Bull transformation).

But after watching Monster, the focus on the physical, skin deep morphing Theron went through for the film feels quite unfair. This is not a cosmetic performance. Yes, it's striking to see her in this ultimate Halloween get-up - but Theron has captured the interior of the tortured Wuornos, a tragic, desperate figure who killed seven men. It's too easy to simply recite the laundry list of duties of the makeup artists - though they undoubtedly have done astonishing work, Theron's Wuornos is a performance of John Hurt/Elephant Man proportions, as much the emotional work of the actor as the outer work of the makeup team.

Transcending the tabloids

With Theron on board, both as the lead and as a co-producer, Jenkins knew she still had considerable challenges ahead of her. Since being captured by authorities, Wuornos's myth had transcended tabloid headlines to become a contentious, ideologically loaded battle of media realities. Was Wuornos a cold-blooded killer who used her victim status in an attempt to elicit sympathy? Or was she the victim of brutal johns, a poor woman who, due to her class and sex, was defenceless in the vicious culture of rural America? The case wasn't helped by Wuornos herself, who confessed towards the end of her life that none of the killings had been done in self-defence, negating much of her earlier testimony. This confession, however, has been written off by many, considering her dire mental state in her final days.

Equally astonishing as Theron's performance, then, is the way Monster straddles the line on Wuornos, making her monstrous and sympathetic at once. "I thought a lot about Shakespeare and Greek myth while making this film," says Jenkins. "Vietnam movies are also about this again and again: how do you take a good person, drop them into a situation where they can actually consciously come to a place where they're committing cold-blooded murder, and manage to justify it and live with themselves? It's such an interesting story to tell - but in order to do it well, you have to tell the human end of it. In that sense, I suppose you do make her sympathetic, though that isn't something I set out consciously to do."

Navigating the badlands

Not surprisingly, Jenkins reached back into film history, watching a broad range of cinematic depictions of murderers. "Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde, In Cold Blood, Taxi Driver - all of those were very influential. Urban Cowboy, because that film captured a world I didn't know in a very rich way. And Midnight Cowboy, because it was a same-sex love story about people who were compromised, but a film about codependence that never becomes condescending."

What's commendable here is the way the film treats Wuornos's vigilantism. As Wuornos finds love in the arms of Christina Ricci, her desperate bid to escape hooking as a means of sustenance fails. Her first killing of a trick is depicted as an entirely justifiable act of self defense, evoking Thelma and Louise, Dirty Harry and even Death Wish. But as Jenkins moves the story along, Wuornos's choice of targets becomes less and less discriminatory, evoking Joe, the legendary 1970 cautionary tale about vigilantism gone horrifically wrong.

"I noticed from day one how hard it was for people to see the grey in between," Jenkins confirms, of the public's black-or-white perception of Wuornos. "She was either a vigilante hero, incredibly sympathetic, or she was this hideous monster. I thought she was both. She crossed this line and killed innocent people, I believe that. At the same time, I thought the fact that she'd actually survived was weirdly heroic. The fact that her story was so rich with all of this was what interested me."

Married with her love of film history was Jenkins' commitment to telling Wuornos's story right. In fact, as Jenkins explains it, she was left with little legal choice, learning by example from Boys Don't Cry - the producers of that Oscar-winning film, based on the true story of a transgendered person who was murdered for transgressing traditional gender roles, were successfully sued for a considerable amount due to dramatic liberties the filmmakers took with the truth. Jenkins was forced to pore over legal documentation, ensuring every incident in the film could be backed up if need be.

Jenkins began her journey while Wuornos was still alive, and corresponded with the death-row inmate for six months before she was executed. Under normal circumstances, when an execution date is set, it usually leaves about two years until the actual execution. But during the election year, Governor Jeb Bush made his hard line on crime clear: in one speech he promised that he would not flinch at governing during the first execution of a woman serial killer in Florida. What would normally have been two years became little over two weeks, and Wuornos was dead. Bush was re-elected.

"Through friends, we asked her if she wanted us to work towards an appeal," Jenkins recalls. "She didn't want any help, she wanted to be executed at that point. She had had such a horrible life and she was going crazy in isolation. I think at that point she was happy to go.

"The night before she was executed, she had a conversation with her best friend, and she decided to open up every letter she'd written to this friend to Charlize and I. There were over 7,000 of them. However, they were not letters we could keep. We had to go to her friend's place and read them there."

"Those letters were incredibly helpful," concedes Theron. "We just read them over and over. Some of the script was re-written on the basis of actual words from Aileen's letters. We couldn't take all of them, but we did take a few. There's a heartbreaking bus stop scene in the film, where Aileen says goodbye to Christina [Ricci]. She really wanted to be forgiven at that point."

Those letters, along with the examination of the Broomfield documentaries, allowed Theron to get to the heart and soul, as well as the look, of Wuornos. "Films are becoming celebrity stories," she laments. "When I wanted to become an actor, I was attracted to the entire thing, which meant losing yourself in a role. I don't have trouble with people talking about the transformation, but when they say that's the only way to get an Oscar, that that's the only way to get attention, I cringe. That's part of my job. That's why Robert De Niro has been inspiring. Because when you go and see so much of his work you forget you're watching Robert De Niro. I don't think of him as a celebrity; I actually get thrown into the world he creates, both physically and emotionally.

"I hope we can go back to a place where the performance doesn't just become a discussion of the makeup or the nose, as in Nicole Kidman's case [with last year's The Hours]. It should be about the story and the emotional reality we're creating."

Family ties

Theron's statement on creating emotional reality affords me the opportunity I've been looking for. As our interview draws to a close, I bring up the thorny issue of her nasty family history, a massive bit of bizarre irony, given her role as vigilante killer in Monster, a history Jenkins knew nothing about when she asked Theron to take the role. Thirteen years ago, when Theron was a teenager living in South Africa with her parents, her father, who was an abusive alcoholic, arrived home from the pub one night with his brother, gun in hand. Clearly drunk, he threatened to kill Theron, who was locked in her room. Theron's mother pulled a gun on dad, shooting him dead. She also injured her brother-in-law. A South African judge refused to charge Theron's mother with any crime, determining that the shooting was committed entirely in self-defence.

Theron is clearly weary of talking about it, but concedes it's going to happen, given the subject of the film. "Obviously, this movie's brought it up. I've been honest about it. I'll answer all the questions, so that this can get demystified. It's not the only thing I draw from in my life though, so it seems unfair to only talk about that when that's only one part of me. There are many other things in my life that I don't talk about that I draw on a lot. I really want to move on. It's been 13 years. My evolution seems to depend on journalists always bringing this up. I wish people would stop bringing it up, it's not that helpful.

"It played the same amount of a role as a number of other things did," Theron insists, straight-faced. "Something as small as getting on a Ferris wheel as a child and being petrified and throwing up all over yourself, that could have a similar kind of impact. But my life is just as complicated as everyone else's, and that's something that doesn't get conveyed."

Theron looks at me. There's a pause. Then comes the other inevitable question: what did her mom think of Monster?

"She's seen it twice. She was speechless. Actually, I sent her the script before I said yes to it. She called me within hours of getting it and said, 'You're an idiot if you don't take this. You must tell this story!'

"After seeing it, she said she was almost ashamed to say that she had no idea that I could be this good."

Monster opens Friday, Jan. 30

>> Movie Listings