Inside 'Apex’ with Charlize Theron: How She Learned to Climb for Her New Netflix Movie

Charlize Theron has just placed her right hand on a crimp when her foot slips.

Suddenly, she’s dangling from the rock by a few mere fingertips, hundreds of feet above the ground. Not only is her character, Sasha, free soloing (climbing without the protection of ropes), but she’s barefoot, and she has bruises and small streams of blood on each foot to prove it. Her jeans are filthy; her blonde hair hangs in loose, greasy strings; bruises speckle her thin arms, and there’s a patch of blood above her right eye.

With a grunt, she swings her right foot up high, placing it in line with her ribs. Her fingers search for a better hold and jostle a few pebbles that tumble to the ground below. Finally finding a better place for both hands, she grunts again as she hauls herself up a couple more feet to a crouched position, and she begins to traverse beneath a rock roof. If she’s going to survive, she’ll need to send the overhang, and overhangs have given Sasha trouble before. Slowly, she inches up, sometimes with a dynamic reach, other times with a more subtle foot placement, gradually climbing higher and higher.

This is only one of many physically grueling scenes from Theron’s upcoming film Apex. In it, Theron plays a grief-stricken climber and kayaker who travels to Australia to spread the ashes of her fiancé, played by Eric Bana. There, she meets Ben, a charming—and chilling—Taron Egerton. At first, he comes across as a friendly local, offering suggestions for under-the-radar rapids to run. It isn’t long, however, before Sasha finds herself literally hunted by psychopath Ben in a nail-biter that’s set to stream on Netflix on April 24, 2026.

Apex is directed by Baltasar Kormákur, who is no stranger to films that star the outdoors. He’s directed and produced other tense survival movies, like Against the Ice (2022), based on the true story of a 1909 Greenland expedition and starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Cole, and Everest (2015), which depicts the real-life 1996 tragedy on the world’s highest peak and features names like Keira Knightley, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Jason Clarke.

“Balt was meant to make this movie,” Theron told Outside. “He challenges himself in the same way athletes do.”

Kormákur expects the same effort from his cast. “The thing is that I do push people more than most directors,” he told Outside. “I’m not a big fan of stunts.”

Theron, who is originally from South Africa, learned to rock climb for Apex and shot the vast majority of climbing scenes without a stunt double. Legendary climber Beth Rodden—who’s known for extreme first ascents, including Yosemite crack Meltdown (5.14c), advocacy around motherhood and mental health, and speaking openly about being kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan on a 2000 climbing trip with Tommy Caldwell—taught Theron to climb ahead of filming. Rodden enjoyed working with Theron, who seemed to really take to the sport. “Sometimes I’d meet her the next day, and she’d say, ‘I watched all these videos on climbing, and can we work on this or that?’” Rodden told Outside. “It was really fun to feed into that beginner’s mind and to just keep the fun around it.”

We spoke to Theron to discuss the trajectory of her career and why she’s drawn to intensely physical roles, the immense impact that the outdoors has had on her life, and why Apex is her favorite movie that she’s ever filmed.

OUTSIDE: What was it that made you say yes to Apex?

Charlize Theron: I found the script to be very simple and not contrived, but yet had this incredible engine that propelled me into a world that I thought was really fun to be in—like fun in a sick way. Obviously, it’s a nail-biter, and there’s action and all of that, but I was more impressed by the concept. I think, in this day and age, people try to make things too complicated. And this was such a pure survival story. I really responded to that.

There was also a lot of interesting physical work. There were epic whitewater scenes. And it looked like you took some real whippers when you were climbing.

For the longest time, I was like, “Guys, is it really called a whipper? I think it’s a wiper.” They’re like, “No, it’s a whipper.”

I loved climbing trees when I was a kid. I grew up in Africa, and I climbed fences. I just never climbed a cliff or a rock wall. I really had such a simpleton kind of approach to it, and it wasn’t until I met Beth Rodden that she really changed it for me. She gave me insight into this sport that I was never aware of. That kind of mental and physical capacity is something that people always talk about in sports or in dance, and I know I’m attracted to those things that make me not think about the physical. But there was something about this—the problem solving with the life and death part of it, the actual heights of it. My logical brain is going, Things could go terribly wrong here. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I love it. I want to keep it up.

I love it, too. I took a break from climbing because I have little kids (15, 3, and 9 months), and I stopped when I got pregnant with my son, so I just went the other day for the first time in four years.

Yeah, you’re in the throes, for sure. I have a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old. It was really nice because Beth has a son the same age as my youngest daughter. All four of us would go climbing together. My daughter happens to be a natural at that kind of stuff. She’s a daredevil, and Beth’s son is obviously such a great climber. So a lot of the time, the two of them were my inspiration. I would look over, and the two of them would just be flying, fearless. It’s a nice thing to share with kids.

How long did it take you to learn to climb for the film?

I spent close to three months with Beth. She was just incredible. More than being an amazing climber, I think she’s faced some real adversities in her life. I really connected with her on that level. Something about her energy was really like the alchemy of me meeting her for this movie, and what this character is going through. It just couldn’t have been any better.

It seems like Hollywood is really into climbing right now. There was Free Solo, the Marc-André Leclerc film The Alpinist, and Alex Honnold climbing a skyscraper live on Netflix. Why do you think stories about climbing and pushing the physical limit resonate so much right now?

For the last maybe decade, it’s been way more prevalent to see people do great things like free soloing. I don’t think a lot of people, prior to social media, knew what it looked like for somebody to climb the Nose in Yosemite. There’s more access to seeing people do that now, which makes people more interested in it. Until I saw Free Solo, I didn’t really, truly know that people did that. I was fascinated, like, “I want to know who this guy is and why he’s not scared of that.” And then through his story, I was introduced to Jimmy Chin’s story, and other climbers; it’s just amazing to see the things that they accomplish.

Why do people love Everest movies? You’re never going to do it on your own, but you want to see how other people do. It’s the ultimate challenge. There’s something kind of bendable about humans. So coming up against a human, there’s room for things to move a little bit. Nature’s not going to move for you.

Theron uses her characters to explore a range of strength, vulnerability, and human complexity. And she’ll go through extraordinary physical and emotional lengths to do so. She gained an estimated 30 pounds to play serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003). The performance won her an Oscar for Best Actress. To play a spy in Atomic Blonde (2017), Theron trained for four hours a day for months and learned various fighting techniques

During the first week of filming Apex, Theron jumped from a cliff into a river below. “When I read that in the pages, never did I presume that she would do it for real, and she did it like five times,” Egerton told Outside. “To see a star of her recognizability, caliber, and esteem doing something that dangerous, it’s really impressive.”

Theron also learned new skills and went through rigorous physical training for Apex. While climbing came more naturally to her, she was surprised when kayaking didn’t. Theron shot most of the climbing herself, but she did rely on help from professional kayakers for some of the whitewater scenes. The crew shot much of the kayaking Theron took on at an artificial river that allowed them to gauge difficulty and control the class of rapids—kind of like a climbing gym for kayakers. “You really have to know your shit,” Theron told Outside. “I was like, ‘I’ve got this, guys.’ And then I flipped over and couldn’t get out from the kayak.” 

It was much harder, she said, than she anticipated. 

You’re known for doing a lot of the physical work in your films yourself. How much of the climbing and whitewater scenes did you actually do?

The climbing is primarily me. We ended shooting with the Troll Wall [in western Norway], even though [that scene is in] the beginning of the movie. I had broken my big toe, my climbing toe, and torn some intercostal muscles on my left side. So I had a wonderful climber help me out with a little bit of the climbing on the Troll Wall. But everything else, except for maybe a few clip-ins, I can almost guarantee, is all me.

That last bit, where I’m pushing over the hill [on the barefoot solo scene]? That’s actually the real cliff. It’s so crazy that they allowed me to do it. I don’t even know why or how we got around it, but we had a crazy, Icelandic director [Baltasar Kormákur], and he makes the movie feel so authentic. That shot, when I’m trying to push myself up on that cliff, I’m actually really trying not to die.

I really took to the climbing. Even in bare feet, I loved it. I think my feet are just kind of dead from being a dancer. I don’t like to climb in shoes now; I find them just pinchy and uncomfortable.

I thought the kayaking would be more natural for me, because I’m really good in water. I’m a great swimmer, and I don’t have a fear of water or anything like that. But I have to tell you, it was not the most natural thing for me. Kayaking was actually more challenging than anything else in the movie.

RELATED: The Best Places to Learn to Whitewater Kayak

You’ve done a lot of demanding films: Mad Max, Atomic Blonde, The Old Guard. What draws you to those more physical, action roles?

I went searching for these movies. I really made a conscious effort to find an action movie for myself, which was Atomic Blonde, because I really wanted it. Besides Mad Max, I wasn’t really offered a lot of action, so I went in search of action, and then I somewhat succeeded at it, and now I get offered a lot of it. I don’t want to just do action movies. My belief is that you can straddle two very interesting worlds of great filmmaking and action. Physical narrative, to me, has always been powerful. As a dancer, being a storyteller, and even as a climber, you’re a storyteller. The way you climb a wall, you’re basically telling a lot about yourself. I think people think that it’s very simple—it’s one-dimensional—and it isn’t. I don’t want to do action for the sake of action, so I have to find a really good story. I only want to do stuff that I’m like, “I want to go see that film.” That’s usually my barometer.

You were talking about Apex as a simple film, but I did feel like you and Taron added a level of complexity to the characters. It could have been a very down-the-middle thriller, but it felt more layered than that to me.

I’m very proud of what Taron and I did, and Taron is a phenomenal actor. He’s rated very, very high in my best actors that I’ve ever worked with. I don’t think I’ve ever been around someone who has that kind of natural instinct and great intuition. He’s brave in the sense that he’ll take big swings. Watching him from afar, I was like, Wow. It’s impressive to watch.

Working with someone like that was important. I didn’t want to be some girl who was just a victim. I think for all of us, it was more interesting to make a movie that was two people finding themselves in a world and needing to survive. The chase was on. Two men enter; one man leaves.

That concept was very simple, but the characters had to have backstories without having backstories. We didn’t want to oversell or overjustify. We just wanted enough for you to understand why she’s there and to see what she’s really conflicted about—which is this tremendous guilt that she’s carrying with her—and that he doesn’t become the tropey psychopath that we’ve seen over and over and over. I thought that we walked a really nice fine line of not going down that over explanation of why the crazy man’s crazy, or why the girl is tormented or haunted, but just enough where you felt like they were smart people.

I noticed some parallels between Taron’s character and what you did with serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. In both, the villains’ backstories added a layer of sympathy or empathy that you might not traditionally associate with that type of character.

I’ve always been a huge fan of empathy, not so much sympathy. Sometimes sympathy can feel very manipulative to me in movies, and most of the time, not really earned. The thing I always aim for is not to have people feel sorry for my characters. I want them to be able to understand them, at least, or want to understand them more. And it’s a tough thing, because I really had to work hard at that.

In my industry, people are sometimes very concerned about female characters not being liked by audiences, even though it’s been proven over and over that audiences really respond to real women. That it’s not gender specific. It’s not that men don’t like that or women don’t like that. I think ultimately the truth is just the truth. You have to stick with the truth.

In my experience, it always feels like, let’s just be safe; let’s just make her sympathetic. We just want the audience to like her. So empathy is something that I really live by.

I wanted to discuss solo travel. In Apex, Sasha’s on this trip by herself. There’s a creepy scene where she’s alone in Australia and being jeered at and harassed by a group of men at a gas station. Then, she runs into them later when she’s alone at a campsite, and they try to intimidate her. Sasha makes the decision to camp there anyway. As women, I think we are often forced to make those tough decisions in real life when we’re traveling alone. Would you have made the same choice as Sasha did in the film?

Well, she doesn’t have a choice because they’ve kind of blocked her in. It’s a small road that drives into this tiny bay, so she’s kind of stuck there.

I had an encounter where I was with a boyfriend, so I wasn’t alone, but it felt like we were in a very lonely place. We were in a Sprinter van, driving around Maui, and we had pulled in under a tree at a beach to sleep. We woke up to four or five guys shooting guns right next to us. It was terrifying, waking up to that, and then just not knowing, what do you do? Do you freeze for a second? I had a way out. I could actually drive away. But part of me was like, Don’t draw attention to yourself. Just try to be as small as you possibly can.

It’s hard to imagine what you would do. Sometimes you surprise yourself by not doing the thing that you thought you would. I think we all want to believe that we can be the hero of our own story, and sometimes we’re just the human in our own story.

Nature has shaped the life of director Kormákur from the very beginning: his mother gave birth to him in the countryside of Iceland, stuck in a snowstorm. Ever since, he has embraced it. He spends summers riding horses across the rugged Icelandic Highlands, and he incorporates extreme environments into his films as much as possible. “I never see nature as a backdrop. I see nature, heat, and cold as elements and characters in movies,” he told Outside. “I always, if I can in any way, make nature play a big part. And when I do it, like in Apex, I like to go to the extreme.”

While scouting locations for Apex, the team discovered a remote cave in the Blue Mountains of Australia. It took three months to obtain permission to film there, and the only way to reach it was by swimming. So when it came time to shoot the cave scenes, they helicoptered in some gear while the crew hiked and swam to the set. “Suddenly, we had everyone—the camera people and the focus puller—swimming like seals to get to the location,” Kormákur told Outside. “The people start becoming part of it, and then I think they get more real.” 

Egerton recalls descending for more than an hour before changing into wetsuits to swim across cold rivers and climb over roots and boulders the rest of the way. “Charlize is really interesting, because I remember she was in such a good mood that day,” Egerton told Outside. “I think she really yearns for the grit and challenge of it; I think that’s where she’s happiest.”

The outdoors tends to strip things down—ego, distraction, noise. At least I find that personally, and that’s a thread that appears in many of our narratives at Outside. Does nature do that for you?

I love the outdoors. I grew up where the outdoors are really celebrated. We don’t stay at home for Christmas; everybody packs up, and you go to a beach to camp, or you go to a river, and you’re camping out in a camper van. That’s just how I was raised. I would canoe a fishing line out for my parents. I remember baking bread inside a fire pit when I was ten years old. It’s very much just part of the African culture to enjoy the outdoors, and it stayed with me.

I can remember so vividly being my daughter’s age, around ten, and looking at a map and wondering, What were all these places above me? I had never been on a plane. I never really traveled until I was around 16, but I had a real fascination with wanting to see the world. I thought I would be a flight attendant, just so that I could fly places.

I think some people are born with that, and some people just don’t have that. I have some amazing friends who care about the world, but they’re just not interested in being in nature. And is that sad? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just not meant for everybody, and that’s what makes nature good.

I also have a bit of awareness that beautiful places can also be horrible places for a lot of people. Bad things can happen in beautiful places. And I think that that kind of juxtaposition I’m always aware of in nature; I don’t go into it blindly. I am always thinking of the things that can go wrong and being prepared. That’s just kind of in my nature.

Do you make it a point to get your kids into nature?

I try to do things with them that don’t feel like work, like going to state parks and showing them what a 200-year-old tree looks like. When you stand under a sequoia like that, it’s really powerful. We go to deserts. We live out in Ojai and have a farm, where we have horses and goats. There are great hikes out there, even though I’m terrified of mountain lions and bears. There’s this beautiful hike into a river in Ojai where you can literally swing on a tree and jump into a pool of water. It reminds me of my own childhood, and my one daughter really loves that. To watch her continuously jump off this tree into this natural space, it’s beautiful. There’s something about nature that moves me.

When you look at Apex, in the grand scheme of your career, what does it represent?

This movie was truly my favorite movie that I’ve ever made. Originally, the script was written to be snowy, like shooting in Canada in the middle of winter. You’ve got to know your limitations. I was like, “I am not good in the snow. I’m not your person. But if we can figure out a place where it’s not snowy, I’ll do it.” And that’s how we ended up in Australia.

The more I read the script, the more I wanted to become part of the environment. I wanted to experience versus trying to manipulate the story. I wanted to throw myself into this environment because I thought that would be the most revealing part of who Sasha is.

We shot in a lot of locations that were a 45-minute to an hour hike. We would helicopter in our equipment. But it would be a bare crew—I’m talking about 20 people going in and shooting—and then everything has to get hiked out. I remember carrying as many bags as I possibly could, because I also needed to stay in shape.

There was something about it that felt spiritual. We were going to places where people don’t really go. We never had to worry about closing sets off, because there was just no one there. The gorge that we shot the end of the movie in was more than a two-hour hike to get to. Then we would climb that mountain all day, or come out of the river fighting each other, load up, and hike all the way back out.

I think we all felt like we were given a great opportunity. You don’t always get to shoot on locations like this, and there was a level of respect for that nature, having ceremonies to acknowledge the land that you’re on. Those things really matter. Once you get into those spaces, and you understand that you’re in somebody’s country, and then you have a ceremony with spiritual Indigenous leaders, that was the part of it for me that made this my favorite movie that I ever shot.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.