When you’re watching Charlize Theron be a bonafide badass in movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fate of the Furious, she makes it all look easy. (Even when she’s doing the action-star thing alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, NBD).
“It was brutal. It really wasn’t until we started shooting that I felt like I was finally starting to get the hang of it.”
But there was nothing easy about the training she did for her starring role in the upcoming ’80s spy flick Atomic Blonde. “I trained for about three months with David Leitch’s team at 87Eleven,” Theron tells Glamour. “We worked about four to five hours a day—eight amazing trainers who killed me every single day, and I am very grateful to them. I learned several skills from a variety of martial arts disciplines, along with boxing maneuvers and wrestling throws.”
If surviving daily five-hour workouts sounds intense, that’s because it is—even for this butt-kicking blonde. “It was brutal,” Theron says. “It really wasn’t until we started shooting that I felt like I was finally starting to get the hang of it.”
Keeping this in mind as motivation for the next time a stretch class sounds like too much work…
For more celeb-inspired workouts, try this 10-minute beach workout from Halle Berry’s trainer, or do some heavy lifting a la GLOW’s Alison Brie.
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