Charlize Theron

I felt like my independence also had to just come from an emotional place.

My house wasn't always stable.

And so I felt very responsible to make sure that I was taken care of.

There was this kind of thing that by the time I moved out of the house, I knew how to take care of myself on many levels.

Before we get to what was going on inside the house, outside the house is also a lot of instability.

I mean, I was looking at your town and, you know, the mid-1980s in particular were sort of a time of violent uprisings against apartheid that led to a state of emergency in your hometown, Benoni.

There was a lot of state repression, resistance.

I mean, you were a very young kid, but do you remember any of that?

Did that sort of play into how you saw things?

Yeah, you couldn't avoid it.

Like, violence and turmoil was something that was like everyday life in South Africa.

If you got in the car, if I went to the bank with my mom, that was something that you just saw on the side of the roads.

And for sure, I saw things that I shouldn't have seen at a very young age concerning violence.

Because that was just the circumstances.

So there was a lot of talk constantly about apartheid.

It was a hot topic.

Like you'd go to a barbecue.

That's what everybody was talking about.

They weren't really hiding it from the kids.

When you say you saw violence, do you remember anything in particular?