Charlize Theron has no plans of ever getting married to long-term boyfriend Stuart Townsend - but she's "madly in love" with Will Smith, her Hancock co-star.
Actress Charlize Theron has no plans of ever getting married to long-term boyfriend Stuart Townsend - but she's "madly in love" with Will Smith, her Hancock co-star.
In the comedy Will plays a boozy superhero who has managed to make everyone totally fed up with him.
Then he meets Charlize's married character and the sparks fly.
It's the second time the two A-listers have starred together. The first was the golf flop Bagger Vance, when Charlize was still relatively unknown.
"We didn't get the chance to work that much together and yet it took us all of about five minutes to really fall madly in love with each other," recalled the 32-year-old blonde.
"We just hit it off instantly and were always messing around. There was something about me and him. We're very similar people," says the Oscar winner, who says they have a "brother and sister" relationship that thrives on teasing each other.
"He jokes with me all the time. He goes, 'Charlize, this is going to be a little different for you, because people are actually going to see this movie.'
Then I'm like, 'I know, Will. But you know what, I have a little statue at home called an Academy Award.'"
Charlize and Will both have long-term partners. Will has Jada Pinkett Smith and Charlize has been with Irish actor Stuart Townsend for seven years and wears a Victorian ring that he gave her.
She has no intention of tying the knot, but still works hard at the relationship.
She said: "If you are in a one or two-year relationship, love is enough.
"When you hit years three and four, you realise that if you're going to live with somebody, you have to be nurtured emotionally and spiritually, and you have to be intrigued. If that intrigue runs out, you're not going to want to go home anymore," she said.
Travelling the world sometimes means long separations, but Charlize was thrilled when she visited the Edinburgh Film Festival a couple of years ago.
Stuart had to stay home, but Charlize was able to go touring on a day off and phoned him from Rosslyn Chapel, where she was given a private tour.
"I said, 'You'll never guess where I am,'" she recalled. As abig Da Vinci Code fan, Stuart was deeply impressed, and urged her to take photos as a souvenir.
Tourist Charlize says there were other aspects of Scottish culture which left a lasting mark on her.
"Whisky," she laughed, and admitted she even had a small dram to get her through her Edinburgh Film Festival appearance.
Stuart and Charlize started dating after they met on the film Trapped and starred together again in a rather unsuccessful World War Two drama, Head in the Clouds.
Stuart has now written and directed Battle In Seattle, in which his girlfriend stars alongside Woody Harrelson.
"It's funny, you live with someone for seven years and then they do something like that and you go, 'Holy s**t. I didn't know you had that in you.'"
The couple have just moved house, and settled away from the limelight with their two dogs, Tucker and Denver. And the patter of tiny feet may not be far away either.
Charlie said: "I've been thinking about becoming a mum for a couple of years now. My biological clock is ticking, but it hasn't gone off yet.
"I couldn't hope for my career to be going any better, and I have found the great love of my life in my relationship, so I think we're ready to start having kids running around the house.
"Getting pregnant doesn't excite me, but having kids does. I know I'll be a mother one day. It's just that I don't really want to look like a whale."
Only child Charlize was raised in South Africa, outside Johannesburg, where she witnessed violence first-hand. Aged 15, her mother shot her abusive father dead. She refuses to discuss the incident, but Gerda Theron was not charged after it was ruled that she'd acted in self-defence.
"Everything changed for me the day my father died. Years ago, I used to cover it all up and say he died in a car accident. It was a way of explaining his absence when I did not want to go into the reasons or the event itself.
"I have now come to terms with it and have been able to move on.
"There's something to be said for coming from a country in turmoil. It made me resilient. When you come from a harsh landscape you have to get on with it. There's not a lot of whining about s**t," she added.
At 16 she left the country for good when she won a competition and travelled to Milan on a one-year modelling contract. Then she moved to New York and trained as a ballet dancer before falling into acting when a talent scout spotted her screaming at a bank teller.
She made her feature debut in 1996's 2 Days in the Valley and subsequently starred opposite Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in the thriller The Devil's Advocate.
CHARLIZE remains fiercely close to her German-born mother and credits her for introducing her up to acting.
"We'd have to travel an hour to the nearest drive-in cinema, and we'd go and never knew what was playing. But once you got there, it was an hour's drive back, so you may as well watch whatever it was.
"I was about eight or nine and Fatal Attraction was playing and Mom didn't want to turn all the way round, so she was like, 'Well, this is as good a way for you to learn as any.'"
Next Charlize is set to follow up Hancock with the post-apocalyptic thriller The Road, co-starring Viggo Mortensen.
It doesn't have Hancock's blockbuster prospects, but Charlize says she doesn't care.
"Every decision I've made has been because of the story-telling aspect or a director I wanted to work with, not how much money the movie might make or what it might do for my career," she said.
Her Oscar-winning turn in Monster is a case in point - she had to fight to play serial killer Aileen Wournos with the pockmarked skin, lank, greasy hair and bad teeth the role demanded. And when she won the Best Actress award, it looked like her defiance had paid off.
She said: "It was great to receive it for a movie that nobody supported.
"There wasn't one person in this industry who wanted that film made.
"We were hours away from signing a straight-to video deal with Blockbuster when we found a distributor. For that reason alone, the Oscar was especially sweet."
Another sweet moment was working with Michael Caine on Cider House Rules.
"I'm so grateful for him," she said.
