14 DAY TRIAL // Charlize Theron has been dating Sean Penn since late 2013 and, even though they’ve walked the red carpet as a couple already, she never spoke about the romance – until now, when she does just that in a new interview with Esquire Magazine.
The stunning actress will be seen next on the big screen in the ensemble comedy “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” but she also talks a bit about her role in another highly anticipated production, “Dark Places,” based on the novel of the same name by Gillian Flynn.
However, since her love life has always been a topic of interest for fans and the media alike, probably because she goes out of her way not to parade it to the world, the question of her romance with Sean did come up.
The Esquire journalist notes that Sean Penn himself came up to their table during the interview, taking the time for a friendly chat and a drink. So naturally, he had to ask Charlize about how things were for her in this respect.
“I wasn’t in any place that I even wanted something like [a relationship],” she says of her life pre-Sean. “Then one day you go: Oh, [Jackson’s] almost two now, and he has his little activities that he goes to and he’s got a bedtime now, and you have more time again. And it’s like if you are open to something, if you just let it happen, it will happen. When you least expect it. It was nice to be single and now it’s nice to be not single.”
She didn’t expect this to happen because she never imagined she and Sean, one of her oldest and best friends, would ever get romantic. After all, they had known each other for over a decade, and there was never any spark.
Still, when it happened, she knew it was just the right thing. Charlize doesn’t say it in so many words, but she makes it very clear that she’s quite happy with the way things are right now in her life.
“I’m sure some people would be like, ‘I would never want to have that life.’ Oh, I’m sure there’s a lot of aspects to my life that a lot of people wouldn’t want. Just personal choice things. Like the fact that I’m single at 38. That’s not necessarily what a lot of women want… I mean unmarried. But I’m just saying, a life is good if it’s the life that you want,” she says.
Charlize never married, saying that she decided that this was not the life for her after she saw what married life did to her parents: her mother shot and killed her father, who was a raging alcoholic, in self-defense, as he had attacked her and her baby. The actress never tried to hide this dark part of her history but used it to raise awareness on domestic violence.
As of a couple of years, Charlize has a son, who is adopted. She and Jackson spend a lot of time with Sean Penn these days, with some reports even saying that they moved in together into a completely baby-proofed house.