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Oh, all the time. I'm a trim believer in faith, but at the same time, we are the ones that make the decisions in our life. And I think a lot of the time our decisions are based on our survival; I think Aileen's decisions were based on her survival. And we would shoot the movie and we would do a scene where she kills one of the innocent johns, and I would say to Patty, "If only she didn't ..." And we would constantly do that: "If only she didn't--if only she'd just left." Because the truth of the matter is, it wasn't that she was pure evil, it wasn't like she was walking around with this thing inside her. She was just trying to survive, and in doing that, she made really, really bad decisions in her life. And if she had maybe made one decision different, who knows how it would have worked out for her? Who knows how it would have worked out for me? I can't imagine having to go back in my life and redoing it all over again. The small little decisions that you make that change your life forever, you know?
Tell me about living more or less as Aileen during the filming. You've talked eating potato chips and Krispy Kremes to put on the weight and how the makeup and teeth were developed and how it's your own hair, which is just incredible. But more than the cosmetic transformation, tell me about the physicality of the role: Aileen's way of walking and that amazing head toss that just captures her whole personality.
She's so the opposite of me. I have really bad posture, and my head is always down. When I make a point I tend to squint my eyes. Aileen is like [momentarily takes on Aileen's posture], head back, shoulders back, eyes big. What happened was, the more I dived into her life, the more I realized that everything she did physically came from an emotional place. I started realizing that all of this stuff--walking into the courtroom and doing that stuff--that's a woman who's been living a homeless life for most of her life. This is a woman who sleeps under an underpass. This is a woman who gets into a stranger's ear and drives out of state with them. I can't imagine living that life. That's a woman who says, "I need to take care of myself. Don't fuck with me." You know? This is a woman who was 5 foot 3--which I couldn't believe--who looks like she's 6 foot 4.
How tall are you?
I'm 5-10, 5-9. The tension in her jaw and in her mouth was really interesting. She had very crooked teeth. I think we all carry tension somewhere in our face--for me, it's my forehead. A lot of cinematographers say I act with my forehead. I think you just have that one spot on your face where it all goes, and with her it was all in the mouth. Which, again, was so not me; I barely move my mouth when I speak. But once I started wearing the prosthetic teeth, which we really based on her teeth, for some reason it just happened. A lot of those things just kind of happen. I mean, the way she swaggered into a bar--when I went into the Last Resort and I saw the guys that she was hanging out with, part of me started becoming that way too. It's just your surroundings, you know?
Tell me about visiting the Lest Resort, the bar near Daytona Beach where she used to hang out--and where you later filmed several scenes for Monster.
Patty and I went up for a week to go and do research, and we hung out with some of the bar owners that knew her and people who were willing to talk to us. I did start wearing the teeth just because [at first] I couldn't speak with the teeth--I had to basically learn to speak all over again with the teeth.
But tell me--you're a fashion model, you're a beautiful woman, you're an actress--and suddenly, maybe for the first time in your adult life, you've transformed yourself into a woman who's not these things that you have been, with extra weight and bad hair and bad teeth. Did people treat you differently?
No. It wasn't like I was in L.A., hanging out with people who knew me. By the time I got to Florida I was constantly trying to be Aileen: I was trying to walk like Aileen, to carry myself like Aileen, things like that. And I think everyone [on the crew] got used to that right from the beginning. When I wasn't Aileen--when I didn't have the contact lenses in or the teeth in--they were treating me weird. Like, Patty wouldn't be able to make eye contact with me. I would show up in the morning and she couldn't look me in the eye until I had the contacts in.
Patty says in the press notes that she treated you as Aileen during the entire shoot, on camera and off.
Yeah, it was really funny. Everybody has to rediscover me after the film. Like [ex-Journey lead singer] Steve Perry, who was so kind to give us the Journey song ["Don't Stop Believing," which plays during Aileen's roller-skating first date with Selby], really became such an "ally and a friend. I talked to him on the phone, and I wrote him a letter asking him if we could do it--we just hit it off immediately. Then he came to L.A. and he couldn't look at me. I finally said to Patty, "I don't think he likes me." And she said, "Charlize, just last night she said to me, 'I have gotten to know Charlize as Aileen so much that seeing her just be Charlize really freaks me out."
Did you have any moments of running out for cigarettes and not looking the way you usually do in L.A. and feeling like the world was looking at you differently?.
No, I guess I just wasn't that aware of any of that stuff. And the only thing that happened was, when we were shooting at the Last Resort, most of the extras were actual people who hang out there and knew Aileen. And so when I did come out in makeup and we did the first rehearsal, a lot of them just couldn't look at me. And Al, the bartender who knew Aileen really well--who kind of laughed at us when we showed up for research and said that I was going to play Aileen--went to Patty and said, "This is really freaking us out, how much she looks like Aileen and how much she's carrying herself like Aileen. Everybody's talking about it." And everybody kind of just distanced themselves--they couldn't quite deal with it. And I completely understand.
Aileen spends a lot of the time in the movie looking in the mirror. In your mind, what was she thinking?.
Well, the first time, of course, is when she gets ready for the [date at the] skating rink. That was really the truth--Aileen was homeless pretty much all the time, and she cleaned herself up in gas station bathrooms. That was who Aileen was. And I just kind of remembered getting ready for high school dances and rehearsing yourself in the mirror and stuff like that. The other moment that I really love was after the first murder, where she looks at herself in the mirror. It was the first time that she had to be OK with herself, with what she had done. So a lot of [the acting] started representing Aileen kind of dealing with herself, having to face herself through all of this and not just through other people. She had to look at herself in the mirror as well and deal with all of this.
I also wondered what you thought when you first looked in the mirror in full makeup and contacts.
It's not the answer that people expect. I was very happy [laughs]. I was very happy because I was very concerned that it would become a joke. I didn't want it to become about makeup or about a caricature or anything like that. And so I was really nervous. So the first day that we did all of it and I looked in the mirror, I was like [gasps], OK, I'm feeling this--this feels very authentic to me and very real and it's not a joke. I was very happy.
Your physical transformation is something you've talked a lot about in other interviews. Another question that I know you get asked a lot is "What's it like kissing a girl instead of a boy?" Instead of asking the question, I'm going to ask how you feel when people keep asking that question.
[Laughs] I haven't gotten it too much. And to me, that was the greatest compliment, because [Monster] wasn't about two women finding each other and falling in love. It was about two outcasts in society who wanted the same thing so desperately: to be accepted without being judged, to be loved and taken care of. And they found each other.
A couple of people have brought it up, and you do the quick answer of "I had the prosthetic teeth and Christina Ricci thought I was a terrible kisser" and all of that stuff, but at the end of the day, it's been really nice that that hasn't been the first and foremost question about this movie, which I'm so extremely happy about. Because with Aileen, the thing that always broke my heart so much with her is that she was so not picky when it came to who was gonna love her. She would've taken it from anybody. From anybody. And that really broke my heat.
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