Charlize Theron can do any genre—she has an Oscar for playing a serial killer, and she gave a standout comedic performance on Arrested Development. She’s also a gifted action star, as seen in her appearances in Atomic Blonde and the Fast & Furious movies, a series which skirts the edge of sci-fi.
But you don’t need to qualify anything when it comes to Theron’s fondness for sci-fi and fantasy. With The Old Guard 2 coming to Netflix in July, and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey due next summer, she’s still going strong—but here are Theron’s most memorable sci-fi and fantasy roles so far, plus a few notable cameos too.
The Devil’s Advocate (1997) and The Astronaut’s Wife (1999)
Theron broke out in the late 1990s and was almost instantly playing leading roles—including a pair of wives forced to deal with supernaturally compromised spouses. In The Devil’s Advocate (1997) she gets gaslit when she catches on that her attorney husband’s new boss is, well, the ultimate bad guy; in The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), she must deal with the similarly alarming revelation that her husband has returned from a space voyage with an alien lurking inside him.
Both of those movies are centered around the male characters—Al Pacino’s campy Satan in The Devil’s Advocate is particularly legendary—but Theron still makes an impression while providing a sympathetic entry point for the audience.
The Old Guard (2020)
A few years after the letdown of 2005’s Æon Flux, Theron made another go at superpowers in 2008’s Hancock, playing a woman who’s been secretly hiding her abilities until her long-lost partner, played by Will Smith, suddenly starts wrecking Los Angeles. It’s entertaining but Theron is definitely the second banana. That’s not the case in The Old Guard, whose ensemble cast is very much led by Theron as an ancient warrior tasked with regularly saving the world while grappling with the sudden loss of her immortality.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Obviously. If this list was ranked, Theron’s fierce portrayal of Imperator Furiosa would be number one. It was nice to get a prequel filling in the character’s backstory, played in a younger incarnation by Anya Taylor-Joy, but truthfully we didn’t need it. Fury Road stands alone, and Theron is the main reason why.
The Orville (2017)
We love the Alien movies, even the occasionally impenetrable Prometheus (2012). But if we want to watch Theron in space, we’re going straight to the season-one Orville episode “Pria,” in which Theron guest-stars as a captain rescued from her floundering vessel. She’s so distractingly gorgeous it takes everyone awhile to realize she’s secretly got some very sinister designs on the titular ship.
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Casting Theron as the mystical evil queen in a rough-and-tumble retelling of the Snow White story is a brilliant idea; bringing her back for a sequel that leaves out Snow White (2015’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War) is still a good idea, even if the second movie wasn’t as good. In 2022, she tapped back into that “evil fantasy queen” vibe, with a little more arch humor, to play the Dean of the School for Evil in Netflix’s The School for Good and Evil.
Bonus cameos
In 2009, Theron had a brief but searing role in The Road, playing a woman who chooses to end it all rather than face life in the post-apocalypse (you can’t really blame her after you spend some time in that film’s particular post-apocalypse).
In 2022, she had shocking little moment in The Boys season three premiere, playing “herself” portraying “Nazi bitch” Stormfront in the show’s in-universe blockbuster, Dawn of the Seven.
But we must give it up for Theron’s “did that really happen?” appearance at the end of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, also released in 2022. In the mid-credits scene, she appears as purple-clad sorceress Clea, a character only comic-book readers would immediately recognize, and beckons Doctor Strange into the Dark Dimension, telling him he needs to fix the “incursion” he caused. Will Clea ever return, or is this a dangling thread that will remain tucked away in Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Even the Sorcerer Supreme probably couldn’t tell you at this point.
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