I wasn’t fun to be around while bulking up for new film Tully, admits Charlize Theron

GLAMOROUS Hollywood stars normally pick at their food, desperate to stay slim for the next movie.

For Charlize Theron, she ate round the clock for 14 weeks to pile on nearly 50 pounds — and had to battle for 18 months to lose it!

The end result, how she looks in new movie Tully, will hopefully make it all worthwhile — and, if early reviews are anything to go by, the film is going to be as massive as Charlize was.

A comedy-drama, Tully follows a friendship between a mother-of-three and her babysitter.

South Africa-born Theron, who is 42 and has two kids of her own, was a model in her teens, so she knows all about trying to keep the weight off.

Her father was a heavy drinker who threatened her and her mother, and the pair moved to Italy for Charlize to focus on her modelling.

Later, they moved to the USA, but Charlize began training to be a ballet dancer, only for a knee injury to scupper it.

She moped around and lost her direction, her mother pointing out: “Either you figure out what to do next or you come home, because you can sulk in South Africa!”

Theron was still in a foul mood when she had a loud argument with a bank teller, and a film talent scout behind her in the queue liked what he saw and told her she should be an actress.

As last year’s Fate Of The Furious grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office, it’s fair to say he was right and she has finally found the job she was always meant to do.

“I gained close to 50 pounds for this film,” she says. “I just wanted to feel what this woman felt, and that was a way to get closer to her and get into that mindset.

“It was a huge surprise to me. I got hit in the face pretty hard with depression. For the first time in my life, I was eating so much processed foods and I drank way too much sugar.

“I was not that fun to be around on this film.”

She would regularly wake up and eat from a cup full of cheese and macaroni, cold, by the side of her bed.

For her two real-life children, they felt the explanantion for Mummy getting so big was simple — they thought she was pregnant.

“My little one was convinced that I had a baby,” she laughs.

“My kids still refer to this movie as the movie where Mommy had a big belly.”

Charlize had previously piled on significant extra weight for another role but hadn’t counted on how the years change a woman’s powers of recovery.

In her twenties, she had found it a relative piece of cake, pardon the pun, to get the weight back off, but this time was much more of a struggle.

The movie is based around the struggle faced by parents, and Charlize says she has found it every bit as tough as anyone else at times.

However, her struggle to put on so much weight and get it back off will also prove very worthwhile in the end, when a worldwide audience gets to see just how good she is in Tully.

Her latest flick is being tipped to be a huge hit across the world, and that will put it all in perspective.

Tully is in cinemas now.