Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron is the star of ELLE's June 2015 issue, on sale now.

Charlize looks incredible in Bottega Veneta and Intimissimi on the cover, and DSquared2 on the subscribers cover, both photographed by Bjarne Jonasson. 

Our respect for Charlize knows no bounds. When we caught up with the Oscar-winning actress, mother and partner to Sean Penn, she was characteristically forthright on the subject of women's rights and spoke frankly about her personal relationships, ahead of the release of her latest movie, Mad Max: Fury Road.

ELLE met Charlize just after she had made international headlines by negotiating equal pay for her role in the Snow White And The Huntsman sequel. She spoke candidly to ELLE about the gender pay gap in Hollywood and her experience of being objectified in the film industry:

'I have to give them credit because once I asked, they said yes. They did not fight it. And maybe that’s the message: That we just need to put our foot down. This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing.  It doesn’t mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you’re doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way.’

Charlize's stance on the pay disparity on American Hustle, and in Hollywood in general is firm: ‘When I thought about the temperature out there – with finding out what Jennifer and Amy were being paid on a set with guy actors who are their counterparts… They’re just as good as any of the guys on there. Yeah, that p*ssed me off!’

The 39-year-old actress also opens up about the anguish of being objectified in Hollywood after her first film role in 2 Days In The Valley:

‘Someone thought it was a good idea to market almost the entire movie on me; objectifying me a little bit. I got a lot of attention from it, but the problem was that, afterwards, it was like, “We want you to do that again. Can you just do that? And so I didn’t work for almost two years.”'

Charlize also speaks openly about her partnership with Sean Penn and the experience of working alongside him on the film The Last Face: 'Putting aside that he’s my partner, he’s the love of my life; for the first time, I felt that my work was really bleeding into my life and that made it hard. There were moments where I was incredibly unfair to him. And moments where I felt like… he was incredibly unfair to me. But it makes you realise that no matter how complicated it gets, the priority is the relationship.’

Read our interview and see the full shoot with Charlize Theron only in the June 2015 issue of ELLE UK, out on newsstands and available via the Apple Newsstand now

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