Charlize Theron Was Hit ‘Really Deep’ by Megyn Kelly’s ‘Validating’ Response to Bombshell
Charlize Theron is opening up about watching Megyn Kelly‘s emotional response to her movie Bombshell.
On Monday, Theron was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Kelly in Bombshell, which tracks the fall of former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow) after Kelly and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) accuse him of sexual harassment.
After watching the film, Kelly, 49, brought together her fellow former Fox colleagues for a round table interview about how Bombshell portrayed their real-life experiences with sexual harassment at the network.
At one point in the nearly 30-minute video, the former Fox News anchor tears up as she says, “I do wish I had done more, even though I was powerless… what if I had thrown myself on the fire back then?”
In an interview with Deadline after receiving her Oscar nomination, Theron, 44, said that watching the video was “incredibly emotional.”
“I felt that that was an incredibly sincere moment from Megyn,” Theron said. “It hit me really deep. I felt something really real in her saying that.”
“We [as women] shouldn’t even be in that situation in the first place,” the actress continued. “We want more than that. We want a world where that’s not even asked. Where we are not even in that situation where we have to choose what we’re going to do in the first place. And I just don’t think that is too much to ask. I think that is a human right that we should all have. We should be able to go to work and live in a world where we’re not threatened, we’re not power-played and we’re not sexually harassed. We’re not sexually assaulted just in order to provide for our families or for ourselves.”
Kelly reported Ailes to her supervisor in 2006 for sexual harassment, but claims she was told to “steer clear of him,” a piece of advice she now calls “terrible.” She was a second-year reporter at the time.
RELATED: Megyn Kelly’s Husband Calls Charlize Theron’s Portrayal of Her ‘a Little One Dimensional’
Theron also told TheWrap on Monday that the people who worked on the movie “were all incredibly moved” by Kelly’s video.
“It was definitely something, we were all, all of us, the producers, the filmmakers, the entire crew, we worked incredibly hard to be as accurate as we possibly could, and to see that video it was incredibly emotional for all of us,” she shared. “And then it felt very validating.”
Theron continued: “How powerful it felt that they acknowledged that they felt that the essence of this film really represented how it felt to work there and be sexually harassed there. And that was ultimately what we wanted to get right. For us, that felt very validating.”
RELATED: Former Fox News Employee Says Bombshell Let Roger Ailes ‘Off Easily’: It Was ‘Much Worse’
In the round table discussion, Kelly brought together her fellow former Fox colleagues — Juliet Huddy (former host of Fox’s The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet), Rudi Bakhtiar (former Fox News reporter) and Julie Zann (former associate producer of Fox News Live) — as well as her husband Douglas Brunt to share their reactions to Bombshell.
The movie “Bombshell” is a Hollywood film about the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News. I have no connection to the film, and hold no stake at all in it. I do, however, have a connection to many of the women who actually lived it. Here is their account. https://t.co/LCkdYvF6qr
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 9, 2020
Regarding how the film depicted former Fox News CEO Ailes, Zann said the environment he fostered was “worse than that.” “So that was my immediate take-away,” she shared. “So this is it. You really let off Roger easily.”
Kelly also provided her reaction to being portrayed on the big screen by Theron.
“I can’t speak to the job Charlize Theron did,” Kelly said. “I’m just too close to it. It’s just too weird to see somebody who looks just like you on the screen, pretending to be you.”
Bombshell is out in theaters now.
