Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton Are 'Bonded in Mutual Agony' After Making Grueling “Apex” Together (Exclusive)
Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton Are 'Bonded in Mutual Agony' After Making Grueling “Apex” Together (Exclusive)
Nigel SmithSat, April 25, 2026 at 1:39 PM UTC
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Taron Egerton and Charlize Theron in ApexCredit: Kane Skennar/Netflix -
Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton open up to PEOPLE about the grueling and rewarding experience of making Apex together
For the film, Theron trained for weeks to become an expert rock climber
Apex is now streaming on Netflix
Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton went the distance for their new action-packed thriller Apex, now streaming on Netflix.
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (Beast), Apex follows Theron's Sasha into the Australian wilderness on a solo kayaking adventure. She encounters Egerton's Ben, who lures her into “a white-knuckle fight for survival against a ruthless predator,” per an official synopsis.
Theron, 50, Egerton, 36, and the filmmaking team shot the movie on location in Australia's New South Wales, including the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. For the project, Theron, famous for performing the vast majority of her stunts in action films like Atomic Blonde and The Old Guard, trained with rock climber Beth Rodden to believably portray Sasha, an avid adventurer.
"I absolutely loved it," the Oscar-winning mom of two says of learning a new skill. "I loved that I got to drop my kids off at school and go and spend four hours with [Beth] in a gym and not learn technique, but to really kind of spend time to understand the psychology around it. It's a deeper thing than just climbing. It really is very psychological and involves a lot of problem solving and also a lot of trial and error. There's no one way to climb something. There's a million ways to climb it. And if it doesn't succeed the first time, you got to start again from scratch. I really love that about climbing."
Adds Egerton, "To use a lofty word, you were in a kind of quite a spiritual place with it. It felt like a kind of calling."
ApexCredit: Kane Skennar/Netflix
"I remember arriving on set to do a small piece with Charlize," recalls the Rocketman actor. "And somebody, I think Balt, must have showed me something they'd done earlier that day, and you just ran and jumped off an actual cliff."
"I couldn't believe that she'd actually done it," he adds of his costar. "I'm not very good with heights, but it was f---ing high, and it was such a statement of intent where I was like, 'Oh, wow. I'm really going to have to show up here because we're not messing around.' And it was so, so impressive to watch."
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For a climactic scene late in the film, Egerton had to do his own fair share of rock scaling.
"The climb that we have to do together was really, really hard, especially for Taron because he had a ... I don't want to give anything away, but it's a challenging climb for us," Theron says. "And we spent a lot of time on that wall, kind of stuck to it. That was so impressive to watch him problem solve how to get his body up this mountain. I was like, 'I cannot believe this guy is doing this, pulling his whole body up this mountain right now.' It was so impressive."
ApexCredit: Kane Skennar/Netflix
Egerton also made an unfortunate discovery during the process.
"I wasn't really aware of it before, but when we started to shoot that climb, I discovered that apparently I am quite scared of heights," he reveals. "That was my surprise. I've got a phobia I didn't know about."
As Egerton jokingly puts it, "We are bonded in mutual agony, to allow myself a little bit of drama, but it was tough going."
Apex is now streaming on Netflix.
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
