Charlize Theron, Gal Gadot fight for more female-led action movies

SAN DIEGO — You’d swear no one had ever seen a woman kick a man’s butt.

On TV, a teenager was doing it 20 years ago on a little show called “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” “Xena: Warrior Princess” had the market cornered a couple of years before that. And since then, viewers have witnessed everyone from Sydney Bristow on “Alias” to Michonne on “The Walking Dead” get in on the action.

On the big screen, there are iconic action performances from the likes of Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” and Linda Hamilton in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Scarlett Johansson does a pretty good job herself throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Then “Wonder Woman” comes out, is on its way to passing $800 million at the global box office, and it’s as though the whole world suddenly realized women can make action movies.

“The character is just so incredible,” Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, said at Comic-Con about the movie’s popularity. “She stands for everything that is good. For love, for compassion, and for truth and justice, and for peace. And there’s nothing not to love about her.”

During Entertainment Weekly’s Comic-Con tribute to Charlize Theron inside a packed Hall H, the actress said she’s hoping her bone-crunching Cold War spectacle “Atomic Blonde,” opening this weekend, will continue the momentum of female-led action movies.

“I feel the support that a film like ‘Wonder Woman’ just had, that says so much,” Theron said. “I mean, if anything, you cannot deny that. No studio can deny that and look at that and not think, ‘We need to make more movies like that.’ ”

There’s a throughline connecting the two films besides the fact that they’re fronted by strong women and are opening within two months of each other. Patty Jenkins brought out Theron’s physicality and helped her win an Oscar in 2003’s “Monster.” Jenkins didn’t direct another movie until “Wonder Woman.”

Tough women

Tricia Helfer has made a career out of playing tough women, even tough robots. Currently starring on Fox’s “Lucifer,” she’s still best known as Cylon from “Battlestar Galactica.”

“You know, I think it’s due time” for more female-centric action movies, she told me at Comic-Con. “I think, as somebody who has played those types of roles, I think it’s really due time that the industry realizes that there is an audience for it.”

Erin Richards is embarking on at least her fourth incarnation of Barbara Kean on Fox’s “Gotham.” This one has been trained in aikido by the villainous Ra’s al Ghul. “I used to dance when I was younger, so it’s almost like choreography,” she said of her new fight sequences. “And I love the physical aspect of it.”

When asked about the potential for more strong female roles after the success of “Wonder Woman,” she told me, “I mean, it always helps when a huge blockbuster like that comes out with a female director, because finally they’re, like, ‘Oh, they can do it.’ And it’s, like, ‘Well, yeah, obviously, they can do it.’ But it’s nice when you set the bar, and the money comes, and the fans come, and then everybody then tries to replicate that. And until that thing happens, nobody has the model, so everybody just makes the man ones: male director, male stars.”

’We really are warriors’

Theron, who went full-on action hero as Imperator Furiosa in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” said she’d been looking for a role like MI6 Agent Lorraine Broughton for a while. “I was open to it landing on my lap, but that wasn’t happening, and I was about to turn 40. So I kind of took matters into my own hands.”

She got those hands on “The Coldest City,” a graphic-novel series about a spy working in 1989 Berlin, and began shaping it as a potential franchise, a la a female James Bond.

The difference between Lorraine and other female action heroes, Theron said, lies in her motivations. In most movies, she acknowledged, a female character usually must lose a child or her husband and set out for revenge. “We’re known as being nurturers, and we might not be thought of as just warriors. So we need a reason to become a warrior,” she said of Hollywood’s thinking. “And I have a problem with that, because we really are warriors, and it’s time for us to be shown that way.”

“Atomic Blonde” is drawing raves for its brutally realistic fight scenes. “I’m going in for my fourth root canal tomorrow,” Theron said in March during CinemaCon at Caesars Palace.

The actress was very specific about the way Lorraine fights, as well. “I only punch with my fist once in this movie, and I actually show you how much that hurts. Because punching with your fist really hurts,” she explained inside Hall H. “For a woman, you can break every bone in your hand by doing that.”

Instead, she said, “Everything I’m using is either my elbows, my knees, my entire body weight to throw. Because that’s the reality. I can’t fight the same way as a guy, but that doesn’t mean I fight any less.”

Theron was in great form in front of the Comic-Con crowd, and ended the panel by delivering a serious message while still remaining playful.

“We need you guys to understand we’re just as good,” she said to cheers and applause. “We’re just as good as the guys.

“Plus, we have boobs.”

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence @reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567. Follow @life_onthecouch on Twitter.