Charlize Theron is delving into the dark details of the night her mother killed her father in self-defense in their home in South Africa.

In an interview with the New York Times that was published on Saturday, the 50-year-old actress recounted how a seemingly minor social infraction one night in 1991 led her father, Charles Theron, to shoot up their home as her mother stepped into action to defend them.

In telling the tale, Theron, who took a swipe at Timothée Chalamet in the same interview, admitted that she once believed that she and her heroic mother, Gerda Jacoba Aletta Maritz, were the only people who had experienced such a horrific trauma.

'I never knew about a story like that,' she said. 'When this happened to us, I thought we were the only people.'

Theron said the kind of domestic violence she and her mother were subjected to 'should be talked about because it makes other people not feel alone,' and she added, 'I’m not haunted by this stuff anymore.'

The future Oscar winner, who was only 15 at the time, recounted how the fatal confrontation was set off by a seemingly innocuous family visit to her uncle's home.

She and her mother had just gone to see a movie, but they weren't able to get back into their home, which was filled with locked steel doors due to the violence engulfing South Africa at the time, because her father had taken the key with him.

So they headed over to his brother's house, where she said Charles could often be found drinking.

'I had to pee really badly,' Theron admitted, 'So I ran into the house to get to the toilet...'

However, her father interpreted her behavior as being 'rude,' as she hadn't stopped to greet everyone in the house before rushing to the bathroom.

She explained that it's a 'big thing in South Africa, the kind of respect that you have to have for elders.'

For the rest of the night, her father — whom Theron previously revealed had been drunk that night — 'was in a state where he just spiraled.'

Theron recalled him pestering her with questions about the visit to her uncle's home, 'Like: "Why didn’t you stop? Who do you think you are?"'

Once she and her mother left the gathering and headed back home, she asked Gerda to help smooth things over.

'I knew he was mad at me. So I said to her, "When he eventually decides to come home, please tell him I’m asleep."'

Theron recalled how 'scared' she was even after she got home, and she remembered going into her room and turning all the lights off to make it look as if she was sleeping. 

'My window faced the driveway, and I could tell the level of anger, frustration, or unhappiness by the way he drove in,' she said. 'I just knew something bad was going to happen.'

Her father — who was carrying a gun and had brought his brother along — signaled that she was correct by shooting through the steel door to the house, 'making it very clear that he was going to kill' them.

Gerda realized just how 'serious' the situation had become, and Theron said she rushed to a safe to retrieve her own gun.

'She came into my bedroom. The two of us were holding the door with our bodies because there wasn’t a lock on it,' Theron recalled, noting that her father made his intentions clear when 'he just stepped back and started shooting through the door.'

'And this is the crazy thing: Not one bullet hit us,' Theron marveled to the Times. 'It’s insane when you think about it that way.'

'But the messaging was very clear,' she added, saying that her father appeared to be signaling, 'I’m going to kill you tonight. You think I can’t come into this door? Watch me. I’m going to go to the safe. I’m going to get the shotgun,' all with the 'encouragement from the brother.'

According to Theron, her mother ended up shooting both her father and his brother in her bid to save their lives.

As Charles ran to the safe to retrieve more firearms, Gerda opened the bedroom door and saw his brother, who ran down the hall away from her.

'She shot one bullet down the hallway that ricocheted seven times and shot him in the hand,' Theron recalled.

'It’s stuff you can’t explain,' she marveled.

'And then she followed my father, who was by then opening the safe to get more weapons out, and she shot him,' Theron continued.

Her father died of his injuries, but the shooting was later determined to be justified by self-defense, and Gerda did not face charges over the shooting.

Theron also mused on how the verbal abuse that she and her mother experienced from him was tolerated and overlooked in South African society.

'Women really get a very, very unfair shake, even in this country. Nobody takes it seriously, the situation that they’re in,' she said. 'And I don’t think anybody took my mom seriously.'

She added that the drinking culture for men allowed people to overlook her father's behavior because so many other men were also heavy drinkers. 

'I have memories from when I was really young, seeing really drunk people, and it scared me,' the actress said, adding that it was so bad that there were 'people crawling on the floor drunk.'

'That became so consistent that it was every Friday, Saturday, maybe even every Wednesday,' she said, while noting that her father had built a bar inside their home to accommodate his partying.

Theron, who described her father as an alcoholic years earlier, said he 'would go missing' after drinking, before finally returning 'in a state that was pretty severe,' which led to 'a lot of verbal abuse.' 

'He was scary. He didn’t hit me, he didn’t throw me against a wall, but he would do things like drive drunk,' Theron said. 'There was a lot of verbal abuse, a lot of threatening language that just became normal.'

Following the shooting, Theron described how determined her mother was not to let it affect their lives. 

'The next morning, she sent me to school. She was just like, "We’re going to move on,"' Theron recalled, admitting that the strategy was 'not necessarily the healthiest thing, but it worked for us.' 

'She wanted me to forget about it. She didn’t want me to sit in it,' she continued, adding, 'We didn’t have therapists around, so in her head the best therapy was, "We’ve got to move on."'

Theron, who would leave South Africa just a year later for a fresh start, said there was a 'lot of shame surrounding [the shooting] because everybody knew.'

'I felt like kids had this attitude towards me,' she said, adding that the 'only time I became violent' was a confrontation with a girl at school who taunted her about having seen her late father when he was intoxicated.

When she was just 16, Theron and her mother set off for Europe, where she launched a modeling career. 

After some early success, she moved to New York to enroll at the Joffrey Ballet School before a knee injury made becoming a professional ballet dancer impossible. 

In 1994, she moved on her own to Los Angeles in the hope of getting into the film industry, and it was there that she was discovered by a talent agent after he witnessed a confrontation she had with a bank teller. 

Theron would go on to score early roles in blockbusters like The Devil's Advocate (1997) and critically acclaimed films like The Cider House Rules (1999), before she won an Oscar for starring as the real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003's Monster.