Mad Max: Fury Road and The Old Guard star Charlize Theron is back in action and faces a challenge far more furious than ever before, in next month’s Netflix survival thriller. Not only does the action thriller find Theron fighting against impossible odds provided by nature, but she’s also being hunted by a serial killer, played by an against type Taron Egerton (Carry-On, Kingsman). The movie will put the pair through hell, and that’s exactly what they experienced during filming.
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the filmmaker known for such Mark Wahlberg-led action outings as Contraband and 2 Guns, as well as the survival thrillers Everest, Adrift, and Beast, Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton will face off in Apex, which is scheduled to be released on Netflix in April. Speaking to Empire, Kormákur revealed how hard the two A-listers went in on the action, with the filmmaker striving to “drag the cast through hell” for the sake of a more visceral action thriller experience.
“The environment, the geography where you make the film, it starts to inform the story and vice versa. Space and weather and landscape are a character in films. It’s very important to me to use it. I try to drag the cast through hell — because they have to experience it!”
Of course, the seasoned action stars were more than willing, with Theron revealing that Kormákur led by example and was “always the first one to f***ing do the craziest thing that he was asking us to do.” Meanwhile, Egerton was forced to confront one of his biggest fears: hanging from a wire. “I don’t usually struggle with heights, but I found hanging from a wire to be quite challenging,” he said. “There’s a free fall, and Balt asked if I would be open to doing it. I decided to give it a shot, and I don’t mind saying — I was petrified.”
Apex finds Egerton playing the rare role of a villain, with the Robin Hood star portraying a seriously sadistic killer, Ben, who’s on the hunt for Theron’s grieving rock climber. Much like with the action sequences, Kormákur wanted Egerton to go hard, saying, “What I really wanted him to do is find the creep inside himself.” For the actor, this meant exploring the dark corners of himself while keeping things intriguingly vague…
“The scariest things in life are always the corners that aren’t well lit, and I feel that way about Ben. I like the allusions. I like the hints at what’s happened, the sense that a relationship with his mother ended very, very badly. But I think the moment you start to spell all of that out and be prescriptive about the character’s pathology, you lose something of the enigma.”
Apex is all set to debut on Netflix on April 24, 2026, and follows a grieving woman testing her limits in the Australian wilderness who is suddenly ensnared in a deadly game with a ruthless predator. A predator named Ben. With such commitment from both cast and crew to deliver hard-hitting survival scenes, and boasting stellar leads in Theron and Egerton, Apex has “new Netflix action hit” carved right into it.
- Release Date
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April 24, 2026
- Director
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Baltasar Kormákur
- Writers
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Jeremy Robbins
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