Charlize Theron looks set to play an ex-CIA operative turned deadly assassin in an upcoming film after Brad Pitt vacated the role. Deadline are reporting that the Mad Max: Fury Road star is close to “attaching herself” to the lead role in a film adaptation of Mark Greaney’s action thriller The Gray Man. Theron would be the latest in a line of female actors having lead roles gender-swapped to suit them, with some actors explaining that good scripts just aren’t being written for women.
“There’s a lack of material for women. A lack of great stories for women,” Carey Mulligan, star of Suffragette, said back in April, and since then there has been news of several high-profile female actors simply taking good roles that were originally written for men. Julia Roberts will star as an investigator who discovers her own child’s murder in Secret In Their Eyes, Emily Blunt stars as an FBI agent in crime thriller Sicario and Sandra Bullock will play a political advisor in George Clooney’s upcoming production Our Brand Is In Crisis.
“Once we realised that you could change it really easily,” Clooney said of Bullock taking the gender-swapped lead role, “It made you realise that there are an awful lot of women’s roles that could be out there if people just started thinking in this way”. It’s certainly a good way to address the paucity of lead roles written for women — only 12% of blockbuster lead roles were written for women in 2014.