'Mad Max's Charlize Theron Talks Shaving Her Head

Mad Max's Charlize Theron is known for transforming. She won the Academy Award for her portrayal of a real life killer in 2004's Monster, a role that required trading in her astonishingly good looks for a bare-face and an additional 30 pounds. She transformed into a glowing goddess dripping in pearls for her Dior perfume commercials that leave viewers drooling in front of their TVs, and now, she's traded in her signature blonde locks for a shaved head and a dusty landscape in Mad Max: Fury Road .

"George [Miller] and I had gone through various different looks and ideas," Theron says of her shaved head for the film. "I didn’t know how to fit into this world. I wanted something that could kind of disappear, and I didn’t know how to do it with a ponytail. The more we did it, it was still a ponytail," she says. "I had done a press junket, my hair was really fried. I had a night where I thought, what if we just shave it? I called George, I woke him up at 3 am, and he was really quiet. Then I could hear him breath, like he took a deep breath, and I took that as a positive."

And that was that. Theron called her good friend Enzo over to bring her a pair of buzzers. "He was like, ‘You should do it,'" she says. "So 45 minutes later it was off and we sent a selfie to George. He wrote me back and he was like, ‘Awesome!’"

Yet for someone who is so esthetically pleasing, so completely gorgeous in the world of Hollywood's high standards, I was curious if making such an unconventional change — like shaving her head — changed her day to day life? "Theres something nice when you take the importance of your femininity and make it about something more than just your hair," Theron says.

But there wasn't just internal changes that came from losing her locks. "I was 20 minutes early to everything in my life," she says. "It’s unbelievable how much time we spend on our hair. And I emptied like two garbage bags full of hair products and brushes, there’s something very freeing in that."

Watch a trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road below, and catch it in theaters May 15.

Images: Warner Bros.