I think all of your experiences mold you into the person that you are. It would just be naive to think that my life didn’t imprint emotionally how I shuffle the cards in emotional situations in my future. I never wanted something like that to happen in my life. It’s not something that I hang on to; it’s something that obviously is there, that I in my own way of therapy, through my work, have dealt with and stayed healthy about. But it’s not something that controls or haunts my life.

I read a really interesting book called I Have Life: Alison’s Journey about a woman in South Africa [who survived a rape and a brutal stabbing attack]. She said, “Now that you’ve been given this gift of life, you’ve got to go and live it. You can’t sit in the past and stay there.” And so for me and my mom, it’s been tough because at the same time we were trying to move on, we always have to still deal with it. I gave my mom the script of Monster to read. She called me back and said, “I absolutely think that this is such a heartbreaking story. So fascinating, such a great tale of human nature.” And that was what we talked about. We’ve really moved on in our lives.

When I think about the life that I went about living from the age of sixteen to nineteen or twenty, I don’t know if I could do it again. It was basically like backpacking. [Theron, who was studying ballet, also started modeling as a teenager; her work took her to Europe and New York City.] I had the same suitcase that entire time with the same clothes, and I just went from one country to another, never knowing where I was going to end up. For me, it was all about, I’ve been given this chance to see the world. At that age, you just kind of think, well, it’s going to work out. When my career as a dancer ended, I had to look into why I liked it so much. And it was really bottom-line storytelling; I wanted to tell stories. Acting just seemed like another natural venue for that.

[The cheap motel she checked into when she first moved to Los Angeles] was not the worst place I’ve ever stayed. I was like, “Look, I can see the Hollywood sign”—that’s all I cared about. And I think that’s why today I’m such a sheet snob, because for years I had to sleep on horrible, dirty sheets.

I knew early on that there’s a thing called typecasting. I wasn’t stupid. I just wanted to grow as an actor—to get some versatility in there. I know for a fact that on my deathbed That Thing You Do! will be one of my fondest memories. All of it—the kids that [Tom Hanks] chose, all of us together, and with him at the helm being such a friend to us.

The whole process of [getting her breakthrough role in Devil’s Advocate] was one of hell—no pun intended. I remember traveling to New York several times, sometimes on my own dime, to screen-test. I read [in L.A.] with Keanu Reeves, like, five times, and then they started screen-testing, like, ten actresses. Then they had to re–screen-test all of us. It was three months, [and I thought], “If I go through all of this and don’t get this film, I’d better be walking away with some immense [new] strength.”

So when I got it, I still felt like, “Oh my God, I’d better not screw up because they’ll just fire me and get one of those other girls!” You’re not just on your toes, you’re hanging from a very thin wire and you’d better not let go. But then it was great because it was working with amazing people like Taylor Hackford and Al Pacino and Keanu—people who force you to stay at a certain place. Pacino was in the process of editing Looking for Richard at the time, and he was doing a play. It was like, “Could you do any more? Are you baking cookies too?”

Acting is easy when you work with somebody who considers you a partner. Then it’s a joy. Some directors are really good at that partnership, and others are not. Part of why I love this job so much is because it is collaborative—you enter a world and everybody’s involved; it’s not just about you and it’s not just about the director. When I find myself in a situation where that nest is really small and only this selected few are allowed in there, I don’t function very well.

Reindeer Games was a great example of choosing a film purely because of the director, John Frankenheimer. I think that he was just an incredible filmmaker; The Manchurian Candidate to me was a perfect film. Anyway, I did that movie because I really wanted to work with him. And sometimes that’s not enough.

The Yards was probably one of the hardest films for me emotionally, and James Gray is very much that director who just will not stop until he knows that he’s pushed you to the ultimate—almost right over the edge. Which is what you want, but at the same time, it was emotionally a very difficult film to make. He doesn’t leave anything untouched. You’re basically shoveling out your innards.

The body is such a great vehicle to tell a story, one that gets neglected. Or when people do use it, they get criticized. When you do something like Monster or what Nicole Kidman did [in The Hours] or what Halle Berry did [in Monster’s Ball], then all of a sudden people go, “Well, that’s just a trick to win an Oscar.” But what people forget is that that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re not supposed to look like or be ourselves. I think Johnny Depp said it really well: “If you serve roast beef constantly, you get bored.” I’m a fan of brave actors who can celebrate that—Sean Penn is one of them, and Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet.

With Aileen Wuornos, it was actually very simple. She was somebody who was five three but couldn’t show that she was five three and a woman on the street. It’s funny, but about a month before I said yes to the film, I went to the aquarium in Long Beach, and it was incredible to watch blowfish [expand]. And there was a blowfish aspect about Aileen—her entire life she had to kind of make sure that people knew she was there, not to mess with her.

Aileen didn’t have the luxury of being emotional—to sit in a back alley to cry about her life. For an entire month, I was playing somebody who held onto those things so deep and so hard. And then all of a sudden, in the last week, I had to show emotion. To break through that wall really took some time. I remember it started to rain and everybody was kind of packing up, and I sat in the alley with my manager and good friend, J.J. Harris, and I just couldn’t stop crying. I had an uncontrollably emotional leak for Aileen.

[After wrapping Monster] I had to go and do Head in the Clouds [opposite her boyfriend, Stuart Townsend], which I was really happy about because it disciplined me to actually let go [of Aileen]. Whereas if I’d come home, I would have really taken my time, I think, before I said goodbye to that completely. But even though I showed up in Montreal and I was like, “Oh, everything’s great,” I didn’t understand why I was drawing the curtains and I didn’t want to get out of bed and I was depressed. It was good to be around somebody who knew me. So that [I knew] I wasn’t losing my mind—somebody who could say, “You just had a really intense experience, and it’s going to take some time, and that’s okay.”

Even when [it seemed that no one wanted to distribute Monster], we didn’t go, “Well, maybe it’s a piece of shit.” Maybe sometimes we did—depending on the hour. But we did somehow believe that we couldn’t compromise and we couldn’t make the cuts everybody was suggesting to water it down.

I don’t think [Monster director Patty Jenkins and I] ever really [congratulated each other on the film’s success]. Everywhere we’ve gone, we’ve been like, “Are you serious?” Even when I was holding an Oscar and I looked at her, we were like, “How did this happen?” We knew when we were working on the movie that no matter what, even if it went straight to video, it was something special for us. We just didn’t know how many other people would think that it was special.

I watch movies and I love to see how people decided to say a specific line or how much to give in an emotional statement. There’s never a right or wrong answer, and it’s great to go to work and have the freedom to throw those kinds of human possibilities around. And as a storyteller, to actually think, how much do you want to give away right now? Acting really is like a big poker game, isn’t it? When do you show your cards? Because we don’t want to know everything up front, do we?

My favorite kind of rehearsal is where you’re obsessively talking about the story a month or two months prior to shooting the film. Where you’re not necessarily doing scenes, but there’s a constant communication about this world—I’m talking about stuff that’s not even in the story—so that there’s an understanding of where all of this takes place. Because then the subconscious can take over.