She acts like one of the boys

“Do you want to know the end?” Charlize Theron  teased  us as soon as she took her seat on the roundtable during the junket held at the Four Seasons resort in Westlake Village for Warner Bros’ upcoming action adventure movie  Hancock.

The previous day, journalists from all over the world  were  treated  to a special sneak preview   of the much-awaited superhero  movie starring Will Smith, the biggest box office star in the world today, veteran actor Jason Bateman, who starred most recently as part of the ensemble in the critically-acclaimed film  Juno  and Oscar-winning actress Charlize herself.

It was the very first public screening of the film and the production made sure that security throughout the duration of the screening was tight. There were three guards, equipped with night vision goggles, roaming the corridors on both ends checking for anyone who would have the audacity to record any footage from the film.

Hancock, which will open globally on July 3, is  Smith’s follow-up to the box-office hit I am Legend. No production details were provided and  only the first 50 minutes was shown to us.  Based on what this writer saw, the film is poised to become one of the year’s biggest box-office hits, if not the biggest .

Those 50 minutes felt more like 20 minutes. The film opens with an exhilarating car chase that begins in one of Los Angeles’ busiest freeways and ends somewhere, let’s just say, 300 feet above ground. We would have wanted to watch more but a sneak peak is still just a “peak” after all. It would be interesting how the  story unfolds  in the second act and no one, not the director, not the writer, not even Jason Bateman (when he sat down with us for an interview) would tell us how it would end until Charlize joined us in the interview suite and hinted   she would let us in on how the movie would end.

“Okay, listen up, here’s how it ends: Will is a woman, I’m a man… No! You don’t really want to know the end!” she exclaimed.

“We think something is going on with you and Will,” chorused all eight of us journalists in the room.

“You think?” Charlize snapped back with a somewhat knowing smile. “I am taking money, I’m taking money,” she  said, laughing.

One journalist from London offered his theory and Charlize just kept on nodding. “Cool!” she responded. “You know what’s been great about this process? Because we all know that nothing is really sacred in this industry anymore? It’s like, we need to know everything and this world, this blogging, this internet, things travel so fast and that element of surprise in filmmaking is really very hard to keep as a secret.”

“I was really interested to see how they would treat this because you don’t want to know something idiotic when really what it is is just a surprise relationship between two people.”

With that we let the matter go and asked her about her dress. The statuesque South African actress, who started out as a teenage model, walked in to the room complaining about the stain on her dress. “I just had lunch!” she said. She cautioned us not to ask who created  what  she was wearing because she didn’t know.

The star confided that she has an assistant who picks the clothes for her but ultimately she has the final decision on what to wear on what occasion. She has an assistant for almost everything, which is not surprising given her hectic schedule. She even admitted to not being able to keep up with technology.

“I am so horrible with the computer. It is almost disgusting,” she said. “I was just recently been informed by an intern in my office that I am “old-school” for being on AOL and for checking my emails on AOL. I am really not good with the internet.”

“I just use it to get enough of what I need and then I walk away from it.”

Does she google herself?

“No, I watch a lot of porn,” she retorted in jest to everyone’s amusement.

She may have been heaped with all the superlatives any woman would die in envy  for – most beautiful, most gorgeous, sexiest, etc. – and to add a healthy sense of humor to that would make her the “most perfect” to any man.

Jason related to us that on the set, she was just one of the boys. If, say, Will would start with a dirty joke, she would top it with an even dirtier joke.

Charlize and Will have appeared together in the movie  The Legend of Bagger Vance  and both actors have developed a bond since then.

“You know that is almost the reason why I decided not to do the movie, but then I thought, you know, Will needs my help so I’ll do it,” she joked. “I was really bummed when we did  Bagger because we didn’t get to work that much together and it all took just five minutes for us to fall in love with each other – really fall in love with each other, madly! We just hit it off instantly.”

“We were always messing around constantly. We were very similar people. We are both real big pranksters and jokers and we really enjoyed each other’s company. We kept kind of pushing each other really further and further but we didn’t really get to work together.”

One time, during one of their on-set pranks, Will accidentally slapped Charlize and she wasn’t too happy about it.

“He tried to fake-slap me one time but the fake didn’t happen. We are still debating this one but he claims that I leaned into his hand and that’s how it happened. I was like, ‘You just slapped me!’ and he said ‘I did not slap you. I just had my hand there and you turned into it.”

And her revenge?

“What did I do? I have to think about it,” she said. “We are just like brother and sister when we get together, and he, and Akiva (the writer), and Jason, we are just like kids when we get together.”

“And he is not a woman-beater,” she said,  half-smiling.