After a hiatus from leading roles, Charlize Theron returns full-on with this month’s Young Adult, a film that showcases her Oscar-worthy talents—and the liberating energy of her newly single life.

“We should keep it classy,” Charlize Theron says.

It’s a warm autumn evening in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting with Theron at a near-empty Japanese restaurant. Up the road, Barack Obama is wooing the beautiful and boldfaced at a $17,900-a-plate fund-raiser, and for hours, the Hollywood sky has rattled with helicopters. But this feels like a much better place to be, across a small table from the 36-year-old native South African and Oscar winner who director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno) says is “in every conversation about the greatest living actresses.” There’s also sake, poured in wooden boxes filled to the brim, so that one has no choice but to lean over, inelegantly dip one’s nose, and slurp it like a Labrador retriever. Which now I do.

Theron laughs loudly. “That’s why I ordered it,” she says. “To make you do that.”

I’d been warned about Theron. Good warnings. She is an actress who doesn’t take herself seriously, who loathes phoniness, who chooses not to live in a gilded fantasy of air kisses and fake compliments, and is not afraid of an adult beverage, a pointed jab, or a scattering of F-bombs.

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