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)
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