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As for casting the young actress who plays her daughter in Sleepwalking, Charlize Theron says that was a little bit more challenging. “Before we sent it to Dennis [Hopper], I was still kind of on the wall about whether I wanted to see the project through because so much of this emotional story relied on finding the right young actress. So my head was kind of like I love this but until we can find the right person to do it I wasn’t going to kind of just do a mediocre job on that.

The story just couldn’t work without somebody who could really [handle the part]. And, ironically enough, she was working on The Reaping with Stephen Hopkins who I did The Life and Death of Peter Sellers with. We remained really good friends, and he was at my house one weekend and I was telling him about this. He said, ‘I’m working with this girl right now. She doesn’t have one line of dialogue. She tells everything with her eyes and she’s amazing, and you should meet her.’ It was a week later Anna[Sophia Robb] came in and we met and I said, ‘Sign me on, I’m doing this. I have to do this with her.’”

After completing Sleepwalking, Theron moved back into the world of big-budget studio productions with a role in Hancock opposite Will Smith and Jason Bateman. Directed by Peter Berg (The Kingdom), Theron claims Hancock is a completely new twist on superhero movies. “I don’t even know how to talk about it,” said Theron. “I just recently saw it two days ago and I actually had to call Will and I was like, ‘I don’t even know what to say about this movie because it’s going to sound so pretentious, but it’s the most original thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.’”

Asked about the film’s tone, Theron replied, “I couldn’t tell you. It literally almost gives the middle finger to genre. I mean, it’s really quite brilliant and Akiva [Goldsman] did a brilliant job, Pete did a great job, Will is fantastic in it, but it is one of the most original pieces of work I’ve ever seen. I knew when we were shooting it, there were days I looked at Will and I was like, ‘What the hell are we doing because I don’t even know what is going on right now?’ And Pete kind of creates that environment, and for some reason it just worked really well with that material. It’s brilliant.”