Charlize Theron to French TV host Cyril Hanouna: Touche pas! The actress gave Hanouna a lesson in consent after he gave her interpreter an uninvited kiss on air, saying, “Maybe ask next time?”
The uncomfortable moment came while Theron, 43, and Seth Rogen recently appeared on the French talk show Touche pas à mon poste ! to promote their new film, Long Shot.
After the uninvited kiss on the cheek aired, Twitter users slammed Hanouna, 44. “@Cyrilhanouna kissed a girl, @CharlizeAfrica underligned [sic] that the girl didn’t give her prior consent and all he does is asking the girl if she was titillated (‘émoustillée’),” one tweeted. “No, she was disgusted, objectified and infantilized on TV by you, stupid clown.”
“Thank you so much, Charlize Theron!” another wrote. “I totally agree with you: even for a kiss, consent is important! And it is something that Cyril Hanouna doesn’t know!”
A third user tweeted, “Being an interpreter and a woman, I really appreciate what Charlize Theron (@CharlizeAfrica) said when the TV host kissed her interpreter out of the blue.”
Hanouna previously came under controversy for hosting a 2016 TV segment in which a man kissed a woman on her breast after she repeatedly said she didn’t want a kiss. Frances’ Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel, a government institution regulating radio and television, tweeted at the time that it would launch an investigation after receiving more than 250 complaints.
The following year, nearly 20,000 viewers complained about a Touche pas à mon poste ! segment for which Hanouna posted a fake ad on a gay dating site and then tricked callers into revealing their sexual fantasies on air, according to the Daily Mail.
Theron expounded on the topic of sexual assault in February 2018 as she reflected on the #MeToo movement in a Hollywood Reporter interview. “The amount of traction and the amount of women who are being empowered by other women to step forward and actually speak their truth, I know in my life I’ve never seen anything like that,” the Atomic Blonde actress told the magazine. “I think success for us as women is going to come out of the support that we give each other, out of not stopping this moment. This is a rock rolling down a mountain really fast, and I’m quite enjoying watching it.”
