Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 03:09 pm
Charlize Theron is “not ashamed” to talk about the night her mother killed her father in self-defence, insisting she wants other people in similar situations to realise they’re “not alone”.
The Bombshell star witnessed her mother Gerda fatally shoot her father Charles when she was just 15 years old back in 1991.
In a new interview with NPR, Charlize explained she has always been open to talking about the incident because she wants to be able to help other people with her story. ”
This family violence, this kind of violence that happens within the family, is something that I share with a lot of people,” she said. “I’m not ashamed to talk about it, because I do think that the more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it. I think, for me, it’s just always been that this story really is about growing up with addicts and what that does to a person.”
Gerda was never prosecuted for the shooting as it was deemed self-defence. The shooting occurred when Charles threatened the family with a firearm in their home in South Africa before Gerda shot him.
Elsewhere in the interview, Charlize described her relationship with her dad as “incredibly unhealthy”.
“My father was a very sick man. My father was an alcoholic all my life. I only knew him one way, and that was as an alcoholic… It was a pretty hopeless situation. Our family was just kind of stuck in it. And the day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night,” the 44-year-old commented. “I think our family was an incredibly unhealthy one. And all of it, I think, scarred us in a way. Of course, I wish what happened that night would have never happened. It’s unfortunately what happens when you don’t get to the root of these issues.”
